Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Most of those accused during the European witch hunt were peasant women. Scholars began studying this phenomenon more deeply because of the second-wave feminist movement, while Marxist scholars have ignored witch-hunting’s significance:

What has not been recognized is that the witch-hunt was one of the most important events in the development of a capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry (165).

This development created more gender division because it inspired misogynistic fear of women. Witch-hunting also attacked traditional folk practices that medieval society had tolerated.

Elite responses to peasant rebellions (which occurred when feudalism broke down) sparked the witch hunts. Witchcraft became a form of heresy and a religious and secular crime subject to capital punishment. Witchcraft convictions rose as the Spanish subjugated large swaths of the Americas.

Witch-hunting was a political enterprise. States engaged in practices that inspired communities to turn on their members. Printed propaganda, including demonological treatises, fueled this “mass psychosis.” Religion played an important role, too. Indeed, witch-hunting served as a “unifying” political tool for European states because it was international in scope.

The witch hunt targeted women who expressed “resistance to the spread of capitalist relations” (170). It was also a reaction to “the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal” (170). Imposing new patriarchal standards that controlled women’s work, bodies, and reproductive abilities was essential to witch-hunting. Traditions once accepted became threatening, and thus criminal, in the state’s eyes.

Rural capitalism’s growth, and the social disintegration that accompanied it, coincided with the rise of witch trials. For example, many of the English cases occurred in Essex, where enclosure dominated the landscape. In contrast, regions not affected by enclosure saw fewer cases of witchcraft. As elites stoked fear of witchcraft, neighbors began to accuse one another:

As for the diabolical crimes of the witches, they appear to us as nothing more than the class struggle played out at the village level: the “evil eye,” the curse of the beggar to whom an alm has been refused, the default on the payment of rent, the demand for public assistance (171).

Elites feared the magical power of the poor, who, in this time of economic precarity and exploitation, were thought to “harbor evil thoughts” (173). Magic is animistic while capitalists wanted to manage nature and dismissed the idea that the world is random or volatile. To believe in or practice traditional magic was to defy one’s capitalist overlords.

Peasant resistance, in which women were active, often prefigured witch-hunting. Accusations about witches’ congregating with Satan (the Sabbat) mirror the isolated peasant gatherings where they planned rebellions. Witches served as symbols of the social inversion and disorder that elites feared.

Most of the witch trials’ victims were women, and demonological tracts stressed that women were most likely to practice witchcraft due to their inherently flawed nature. Accusations of “reproductive crimes,” such as abortion and infanticide for diabolical sacrifice, were prominent in witchcraft cases. Witch-hunting demonized birth control and turned women’s bodies into sites of public concern because they were machines for growing the population and thus the supply of workers. Midwives were frequent victims of witchcraft accusations; the witchcraft treatise the Malleus Malificarum claims that they participated in infanticide. Marginalizing midwifery made it easier for the patriarchy to control women’s reproduction. Witch-hunting seized control over women’s bodies, just as enclosure took control of land from the peasantry. Women who resisted the imposition of these new standards were considered lewd or scolds, making them vulnerable to witchcraft charges. Witch-hunting launched a “war against women” (186).

Witch hunters accused so-called witches of serving as the devil’s subordinates. Satan became a single, inherently masculine figure in the early modern mind. Witches made pacts with him that functioned as a “perverted marriage contract” (187), confirming their submission to him. Men feared women’s power to hinder their masculinity by causing impotence, but they also believed witches could cause “excessive erotic passion in men” (190), which similarly disempowered men. Women’s sexuality consequently posed a threat to patriarchal authority. In response to this threat, elites launched a “transformation of female sexuality into work” so that “non-procreative forms of female sexuality” were demonized (192). Accusations of bestiality involving “familiars” are reflective of elite fears about the sex lives of the lower classes and women’s animalistic, carnal nature. The witch hunt gave rise to modern (Western) sexual mores and hang-ups, like the condemnation of sex work. Meanwhile, the “high magic” of the elite, male Renaissance astrologist escaped this persecution because authorities considered it scientific.

Colonized peoples and enslaved Africans were the “counterparts” to the female witch in Europe. Women in the colonies were more often accused of witchcraft than men, as in Europe, due to European stereotypes about women’s character and Indigenous women’s resistance to colonial rule. Racism also permeated colonial witch-hunting since authorities associated Black people with the devil’s blackness. Witch hunters in the colonies frequently accused people of color of diabolism. These sexist and racist tropes were grounded in capitalism:

For the definition of blackness and femaleness as marks of bestiality and irrationality conformed with the exclusion of women in Europe and women and men in the colonies from the social contract implicit in the wage, and the consequent naturalization of their exploitation (200).

Women who practiced traditional folk healing also fell victim to witch-hunting. The demolition of this traditionally female, generational knowledge functioned as “a new form of enclosure” (201). Male physicians squeezed women out of practicing medicine. Some witchcraft scholars credit the Scientific Revolution and rational thought with fostering skepticism that ended the witch hunts. However, none of these thinkers championed the accused. Instead, capitalists felt increasingly “secure” as they transformed European society through the imposition of new social norms. Rationalism that proclaimed witchcraft a “superstition” buffered this sense of security. Eventually the powerful fell victim to accusation as witch-hunting spiraled out of control. The very powers that launched the hunts henceforth ended them, although smaller, localized bursts of witch-hunting persisted into the 19th century.