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0:00
I'm historian Mickey Brock.
0:00
Let's answer your questions from the internet.
0:02
This is Witchcraft support, it's too silly.
0:14
At Lea Likes music, can men be witches or is it just for the girls?
0:21
Yes, men can be witches.
0:21
Anywhere between 75 and 80% of those accused of Witchcraft were women.
0:26
There were a few places where the majority of people accused of Witchcraft were men: Russia, Estonia, Normandy, Iceland.
0:33
But these were also places where the witch trials never boiled into a full-blown panic.
0:38
A lot of the men who are accused of Witchcraft are accused in moments where they are related to or in proximity to a woman who is accused of Witchcraft.
0:47
So their mother might have been accused, their sister, their aunt, their wife even, and that could bring them in the minds of authorities closer to the crime and could make them vulnerable to that allegation.
1:00
There were also some men who ran afoul of traditional norms of masculinity.
1:06
They might have used their power in a way that was deemed irrational.
1:06
Men were supposed to be rational, the opposite of women who were irrational and emotional.
1:06
These sorts of deviations from the norms of masculinity could make potentially someone more vulnerable.
1:06
You may remember the case of Giles Corey.
1:06
Giles Corey was made famous by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and he is the man in that story and in the actual history who was pressed to death after he was accused of Witchcraft.
1:26
That is to say a slab of wood was laid on top of them and then rock was placed and rock was placed and rock was placed until he was pressed to death into the Earth.
1:45
He had been accused of Witchcraft after his wife Martha Corey had been accused, and the reason he was pressed to death like this is because he refused to enter a plea.
1:45
And in English law, you had to enter a plea, are you guilty or not guilty, right?
1:53
This system lives on, but he wouldn't say anything, he held fast.
1:57
And of course, very famously, and this may be apocryphal, we don't know for sure if he said this, but Arthur Miller said he did: Giles Corey's last words were defiantly, "More weight."
2:08
Our next question is from Adam Mline.
2:08
What better way is there to spend a Thursday morning than learning about methods of torture used on accused witches in Scotland?
2:08
I too enjoy thinking about torture methods.
2:08
We're talking about 90,000 people accused and about 50% of them executed, and torture was really key in order to get people convicted for witchcraft.
2:08
And that's because when you think about witchcraft, it's a crime that's kind of unseen, it's secret, it's hidden, it's concealed.
2:08
If you don't have eyewitnesses to the crime, then what you need is a confession.
2:08
You need an individual to confess to meeting with the devil under the cover of night, using harmful magic to kill babies and harm crops and render men impotent.
2:08
So the question might be, what sorts of torture methods did they use?
2:08
If you're interested in Scotland, they really enjoyed the thumbscrews, these little screws that tightened and tightened and tightened on your thumb.
2:08
In some places they were a little bit less gruesome, like the use of sleep deprivation, which was common in England in the 1640s.
3:05
Other places more gruesome still, like the rack, a medieval torture device that was used into the early modern period that could either stretch or compress limbs.
3:19
The strappado, which is used to tie arms behind one's back and hoist you up over a pulley, sometimes with weights attached to your legs, so that your shoulders become dislocated.
3:19
So really horrific stuff.
3:16
And of course, we know torture gives us terrible information, it's not good judicial practice.
3:31
But it was useful for authorities who felt that witchcraft was such an exceptional crime they would use torture in ways they typically wouldn't.
3:38
People were allowed to flout the typical legal norms and practices, and what that meant is you could get people to confess to all sorts of fantastical things.
3:45
Next question is from Ask Historians, great website on Reddit, and it is asked by Sir Drunken the Tall.
3:54
Sir Drunken, 10 out of 10 name, I feel like you're a Monty Python character.
3:58
How did the Salem Witch Trials become the face of the historical witch hunts when European Witch Trials took place much earlier and were more numerous?
4:07
Number one, America, right?
4:07
The dominance, kind of the cultural imperialism of America has really brought the witch trials, Salem Witch Trials, to front of mind.
4:15
And of course Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which was performed on both sides of the Atlantic, is going to be part of that.
4:21
I think Salem too is kind of shocking, it's late, right?
4:26
It's in the early 1690s, happens in this Puritan colony that's often held up as this great example of the American experiment.
4:34
And I think because it's so late, people think, surely this is a time period when they've stopped hunting witches by the end of the 17th century, right?
4:41
The 17th century is the heyday of the Scientific Revolution, we're talking about, you know, Galileo and Isaac Newton and all of these things.
4:48
So people see Salem as sort of a shock to the system, whereas potentially a 16th century witch trial seems more understandable.
4:54
But I also want to say that this idea that the witch hunts happened in the Middle Ages, they didn't.
5:01
If you ever hear someone say witch hunting was a medieval phenomenon, it was not.
5:05
The bulk of the witch hunts happened in the early modern period, that is to say the 16th and 17th century.
5:09
Kora asks, were witches ever burned at the stake in the USA like they were in Britain?
5:16
Actually, I'm going to go with no and no.
5:18
They were hung in New England and in the colonies, and they were also hung in England.
5:23
English common law treated witchcraft as a crime of sort of treason and act against the state, an act against the church, and it wasn't treated as a heresy, so they weren't burned, they were just hung in England and the English colonies.
5:35
In Scotland they were strangled and then burned, and then in many places in Continental Europe they were straight up burned.
5:42
So a nice range of execution methods we have there.
5:44
Now we have a question from Phil Array.
5:51
Why were the witch tests so deadly and dumb?
5:51
Almost all the tests required the person to die even if there was no proof that they were or not.
5:51
So the witchcraft tests, these are variations on what people called in earlier periods the trial by ordeal, the idea that you could do a certain test.
6:01
The most famous one that we tend to think of is the swim test, the dunking of witches, the throwing the women into water and seeing if they floated or not.
6:12
People really thought divine providence was critical, it was crucial, so there was a lot of confidence that God would not let an innocent person die, and that belief was really strong, it underpinned the faith in these tests.
6:25
Now let me say, actually the swim test, the thrower into a pond, you know, as they do in Monty Python, there are ways of telling whether she is a witch that isn't actually used as often as we're led to think by its prominence and popular culture.
6:40
But it did happen, and it is an example again of that belief that humans were not alone in the world and there were a lot of other forces that governed the application of justice and the rooting out of evildoers.
6:54
Another excellent question from Reddit's history forum, asked by Six Horigoth.
7:02
How is it that there were Witch Trials happening in different parts of the world around the same time?
7:02
It's the printing press.
7:02
You have the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, or at least the use of it and development of it in Europe, and that leads to the printing of these demonological texts that are being spread around.
7:16
So the printing press allows stories of say, witches in Scandinavia to be printed and read about in London or in Boston, and that's going to help create this sort of consistency in the Western notion of the witch.
7:31
At Mike Queener, do witches really cast spells or are their abilities limited to potions and stuff?
7:40
Well, people believed that witches had a wide range of powers.
7:42
They believed witches certainly could use potions.
7:47
Double, double, toil and trouble, right?
7:49
Shakespeare's famous line.
7:49
Probably the most gruesome thing that people imagined witches to do is people imagined that some witches might grind up or use parts of humans, especially parts of unbaptized infants, to make them into a paste, to make them into a potion and anoint themselves in order to fly.
8:07
If you've seen The Witch from 2015, you'll remember the scenes of the witch in the woods grinding something on the stone block and then sort of flying out and turning younger.
8:07
That was envisioned to be parts of a baby.
8:07
But it draws on older stereotypes about blood liable Heretics doing these sorts of horrible practices to children and by labeling accused witches as killers of babies and even as cannibals using the pestle and mortar to grind up some bones of babies, whatever is a very surefire quick way to dehumanize them and to demonize them.
8:07
Scott Daily 26 asks, has anyone watched The Witch?
8:07
What an absolute shite horror film that is.
8:07
Scott, Scott, my man, no, The Witch is a brilliant film.
8:07
I think you just may be conditioned to people jumping out of corners and going, and there's none of that in The Witch.
8:07
Robert Edgar's The Witch, which came out in 2015, is to my mind, and I'm just saying this, I'm just the expert, the best film about witchcraft ever made.
8:07
It looks at a family in the 17th century in New England grappling with fears of witchcraft and it is the perfect encapsulation, I think, of Puritan anxieties, of theology, of fears the Puritans had about whether or not they were elect, and of this sort of fever dream about witchcraft that so took hold of people's minds.
8:07
When you watch the film The Witch, you get a real window into why the witch was so scary to people.
9:38
It really helps us understand why people thought witches were deadly and a threat to their families, to their livelihoods and to their community.
9:47
So I know Scott says it was shite.
9:47
I don't think it was shite, I think it was great, five stars.
9:50
How many stars are there?
9:52
A lot of stars, all the stars.
9:52
I have two scenes from The Witch that I really love, they also happen to be quite gruesome.
10:00
One is, of course, the scenes involving Black Phillip, who is the goat that belongs to the family.
10:31
The goat is really sort of emblematic of many depictions that we have in popular culture and historically of the devil as this goat figure, which of course is again an inversion of the idea of the lamb, right?
10:31
The Lamb of God, the black goat is an inversion of that.
10:31
Of course, also a demonization of certain pagan rituals, ideas about Pan, whatnot, that's why the goat's often associated with Satan.
10:31
But Black Phillip is a perfect devil.
10:31
The other scene that I really love, there is a scene where a child in the film is sort of having this experience of bewitchment and is kind of having these almost possessed convulsions and in that process spits up an apple.
10:35
And there's your clue to the role of the Eve narrative.
10:43
He's been in the woods with a witch and he comes back possessed and chokes up an apple and that's straight to that stereotype that we see in a lot of depictions of witches.
10:57
Next question is from @JasmineAmmani, who came up with the idea that witches could fly on brooms and why?
10:59
This is a great question.
11:02
The broom is one of those iconic images that we associate with the witch.
11:05
Number one, the broom is a totally domestic object and so much of what we think of when we think of witchcraft is associated with the domestic sphere, right?
11:14
You have the cauldron, right, the mortar and pestle, these things that you would find in the home.
11:18
And that's because when you think of the crimes that Witch is supposedly committed, many of them were about harm to the domestic sphere, children, food, crops and so forth.
11:29
Now during the early modern period, people did wonder about whether witches could fly.
11:34
Authorities really thought about this, how did it happen, how did it work?
11:37
And the idea fundamentally was that with the aid of the devil, witches could fly to undisclosed locations, maybe a mountain under cover of darkness, maybe a forest far away on a hill, and there they could meet under cover of night and engage in the witch's Sabbath which was envisioned, believed, fantasized to involve all sorts of demonic acts, orgies, cannibalistic infanticide, singing and feasting and things that were in some ways inversions of appropriate Christian practice.
12:18
Another note about the broomstick is it was sort of envisioned to be a fairly phallic object.
12:18
Now looking at this, make your own judgment, if you believed that witches were engaging in sex with the devil, then having these sort of phallic objects could re-emphasize that aspect of witches being carnal and being in sort of lustful service of Satan.
12:18
I love modern takes on some of this.
12:18
I love how in Hocus Pocus, when you're looking for a domestic object that's like more or less phallic adjacent, you have one of the witches grabbing a vacuum.
12:18
Now they weren't grabbing vacuums in the 16th century, but in our modern retelling, they serve that same purpose as the broom.
12:18
Next question is from @WickedWalnut.
12:18
I didn't know walnuts could be wicked, but now I do, I guess anything can.
12:18
Anyhow, is the Malleus Maleficarum worth reading at this late date?
12:18
Well, for those of you who don't know, the Malleus Maleficarum is the Hammer of Witches, is what it literally translates to, and it's a work that's published in the late 1480s by a very nasty piece of work, a Dominican Inquisitor called Hinrich Kramer, who basically was pissed off that he wasn't being trusted to run these witch trials in Innsbruck and writes this screed that's meant to be used as a guide to identifying and hunting witches.
12:18
And should you read it?
12:18
Is it worth reading?
12:18
Well, how much do you enjoy misogyny and demon sex?
12:18
If you enjoy both of those things, then that is the book for you.
12:18
But in all seriousness, it's a book that is really important for sort of promoting some of those misogynistic tropes that are part of the witch trials.
12:18
Certainly one of the things that Hinrich Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum was obsessed with was this idea of witches as being carnal and witches as being lustful and witches as having uncontrollable tongues that couldn't be trusted.
12:18
He really thought mouthy women tended to be witches.
12:18
So I can only imagine what he would have made of me and many of the women in my life.
12:18
Sometimes my students ask me why the Malleus Maleficarum was so popular, why was it translated so quickly into English, why did it become so prevalent, and why today do we still think about it, right?
14:08
If anybody knows a witchcraft book, that's what they know.
14:15
And part of it is I think because the Malleus Maleficarum is at times quite illicit, it's quite pornographic.
14:15
One of the most salacious, interesting folkloric stories in the Malleus Maleficarum is this story of this group of witches who were widely known as, he says, to be stealing men's members and taking them up to a tree and putting them in the branches and feeding them corn.
14:15
It gets a bit weird.
14:11
And a man came to the tree and said, "I've lost my member, I need my member."
14:39
And the witches say, "Okay, you can choose yours from this tree, but do not take the biggest one, for that belongs to the village priest."
14:47
I love that story because in some ways it combines folklore but also with actual witch belief.
14:54
People were really worried about witches causing impotency.
15:00
There really was a case of witchcraft in the 17th century where a man supposedly lost his penis to a witch.
15:02
And I tell this story to my students and we actually read parts of the Malleus.
15:09
I have to say though, I teach my witch hunts class at 8:00 AM and a lot of them say, "That's too early for demon sex and penis trees."
15:09
But you know.
15:09
Next question is from @SunderedSeas.
15:09
Who is going to tell these people that the Salem Witch Trials were the result of mass hysteria from false accusations and not actual witches like the European witch hunts?
15:25
So I don't think we should call this a mass hysteria.
15:28
I think there are moments where we can think about it as panic, where things really go off the rails, accusations get made willy-nilly.
15:33
But it wasn't a panic, this was a group of people who truly and genuinely feared witches.
15:39
The sort of authorities that they looked to, clerics and judges, and of course the Bible provided fodder for this, it says in scripture, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." It's scriptural.
15:52
So the sources of authority suggested that witches had to be eradicated.
15:54
And the worldview at the time, the belief system, meant that it was very rational to believe in witches.
16:00
Think about it, early modern life is hard, right?
16:02
We all live by comparison in homes with thousands of candles and we have thousands of horses at our disposal if you have a car, and we never worry about what we're going to eat and we have vaccines and all of those things.
16:17
We don't have to work in the same way to find explanation for misfortune, and I think if you understand that, then you can't quite as easily dismiss the fears of witchcraft that were going on at the time period.
16:33
@DrSandman11 asks, why is witch hunting considered to be bad?
16:33
They tried to eat some children in a gingerbread house that one time.
16:37
Dr. Sandman, I love this question because it brings in one of the most prominent stereotypes that occurs not just actually in witch hunts, but in moral panics in general, and this is the fear of the spectre of harm to children.
16:53
The Hansel and Gretel story fundamentally is about these two innocent kids who just love candy following the trail into a gingerbread house and then becoming a nice midnight snack popping in the oven, whatnot.
17:01
What's the inversion of the good mother?
17:03
Someone who harms children.
17:05
Women are meant to give life to children, to nourish them, so the inversion of that, the inverse of that, the opposite of it, is this witch who harms them, who eats them even.
17:14
And that's why you see harm to children in so many of these witchcraft cases and that's not unusual to witch trials, right?
17:21
Much of the stereotypes about Jewish communities early on are related to harm to children, to blood libel.
17:33
You see it certainly in the Communist scare, actually this fear that communism could be spread to children.
17:33
What about the children?
17:33
You see it in the Satanic panics of the 1980s, this fear of what's going on at pre-K and daycares and whatnot.
17:33
So harm to children, I think, is one of those useful movable fictions that people use as a way to articulate, to justify, and to demonize over the course of repeated moral panics that are still very much with us.
17:33
I think at Wisem40718, why do witches always have such a nose in cartoon movies in Disney?
18:04
Well, you see in some of these visual depictions of witches, including from the late 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, of these sort of large appendages, large noses, things that mark them out from other members of the community.
18:19
And of course, the large nose trope, which is actually more prominent in some later depictions than in the early modern period itself, comes from anti-Semitic stereotypes.
18:29
There's very little new that's under the sun, so much about the witch trials is pulling from stereotypes from other moments of panic in European history.
18:39
So if we watch this little clip about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, of that famous scene of the witch holding out the poisoned apple and offering it to Snow White, "This is no ordinary apple, it's a magic wishing apple, and take a bite."
18:57
Ah, I think we see some really prominent stereotypes that you can find in a number of the witch trials.
19:05
First of all, the apple, if you see a woman with an apple, your brain should immediately go to Eve, here is someone offering temptation, offering something that they shouldn't have access to.
19:15
And of course, you have the witch in the scene, she's kind of an Eve figure, right?
19:20
She's evil, she's been tempted by the devil.
19:23
And then you have Snow White who is, of course, virginal, pure, a very Mary figure, right?
19:37
We are always sort of skirting within this Madonna, Mary, Eve complex and how people envision the roles of women and it was very hard if you were a woman in any period to be a Mary, so people were more likely, especially authorities, to think of you like an Eve.
19:37
You also have in this scene, this famous scene of the witch holding the apple to Snow White, her wearing a dark cloak that is kind of reminiscent of the way people envisioned heretics to meet under the cover of the night and that large cartoonishly anti-Semitic nose that you see in some of these depictions.
19:59
At Bunson Burner BMD asks, why do we associate cats with witches?
20:04
This idea of cats being associated with witches comes actually very specifically from the English witch trials where witches were believed to have demonic familiars, so local domestic animals, a cat, a toad, a bunny, whatever, that was believed to be a little demon or a little creature doing the devil's bidding that was feeding off the witch.
20:27
And this really becomes prominent in particular in some major witch hunts in the 1640s in East Anglia where you have Matthew Hopkins and John Stern style themselves as self-appointed witchfinders and go out and basically use sleep deprivation to get people to confess to witchcraft.
20:40
Any of you who have ever owned a cat will know they are finicky creatures, they have a mind of their own, they do their own thing.
20:40
Also, cats have always been sexualized, we'll all know the slang that is associated with cats and that's another thing that gets them kept up to the forefront of being associated with witchcraft.
20:40
Probably the most recognizable object associated with a witch is, of course, the witch's hat, but I have to say historians aren't entirely sure where this comes from.
20:40
Some people have posited that it's related to kind of an exaggeration of the types of caps people would have worn during the time period.
20:40
Maybe it has some anti-Semitic roots, maybe it's just frankly a really good way to mark someone as different than others in society.
20:40
But they do show up only rarely in pamphlets from and woodcuts from the time period, but they have certainly become dominant norms in today's society.
20:40
So happy Halloween.
20:40
This question is from @HolySchnit, googling how to spot a witch.
20:40
Let's imagine I am a minister and it is 1630s in a small town just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland and I'm advising my parishioners on how to spot a witch and it's very important they do so, we want to avoid divine wrath.
20:40
What I might tell them is if you hear a woman who, on the margins of society in some way, maybe she's widowed, maybe she's poor, maybe she's just contentious, maybe you're skipping out on the church, maybe you're Sabbath breaking, but if you're an ordinary person, you're really only looking for a witch if something bad happens.
22:06
If your cow dies, if your child dies, if your husband goes impotent, you might think back to yourself and think, did someone do me wrong?
22:20
Did something happen that could have been perceived to be an act of harmful magic?
22:27
And you might think, did you have a neighbor who you quarrelled with and did that neighbor fit the bill of someone who could be a witch?
22:24
And that would help you identify who the witch was.
22:34
At Carolyn Calo asks, why did the Salem Witch Trials start at all?
22:40
Caroline, great question, and how much time do you have?
22:42
The long-term causes are that we should understand Salem as coming at the tail end of a much larger chapter of European witch hunting.
22:49
That is to say, the Salem witch hunts are in the early 1690s.
22:53
By this point, most places in Europe have already hit their peak witchcraft and witch trials are starting to decline.
23:00
But Salem is very much part of this story, part of the circulation of all these demonological ideas about witches, about the devil and the ways that they might interact in the world.
23:10
And of course, when people come from England to the so-called New World, to these colonized lands in New England and elsewhere, they are bringing with them those ideas.
23:18
The other sort of long-term causes are this intense Puritan desire to build a city upon a hill.
23:25
When you have the major wave of Puritan immigration in the 1630s, you have people coming who want to build a truly pure, truly godly society and that takes zeal.
23:34
They see themselves as fleeing persecution back in England and coming to the New World in order to build something better and more godly.
23:42
And if you want to build something better and more godly, you have to be on the lookout for any threats from the devil.
23:48
And for the Puritans who settled in Boston and beyond, they really saw themselves as under threat from a range of actors.
23:54
They were colonizers of course, so they were coming into conflict with local indigenous groups and they are going in some ways to perceive indigenous peoples as being potential servants of the devil and especially they think this after waves of Frontier Wars that took place in the middle and latter part of the 17th century.
24:13
Short-term causes are there's so much communal feuding, there are debates among community members, there's a general sense of unrest and distrust of one's neighbors.
24:21
A new minister has come to Salem a couple of years before the Salem Witch Trials, a guy called Samuel Parris, a real, and he is certainly at the center of a lot of these witch trials.
24:30
It's really in his home, he's the minister of the newly appointed Salem Village where the witchcraft symptoms start.
24:30
So Samuel Parris, this die-hard Puritan minister, he has a daughter Betty Parris and a niece Abigail Williams, they're in his home, they're young, 9 and 11, and they start to experience symptoms of bewitchment and affliction.
24:30
And that is what gets the witch trials going.
24:30
They are the first of the afflicted girls and it sort of spread like wildfire from that.
24:30
And that's partially because it serves the purpose of Samuel Parris, if this minister is trying to make his way in the world, if he is trying to sort of show himself as the godly emissary on Earth, then of course the devil's going after him, right?
24:30
This legitimizes his position.
24:30
And I think we also have to ask the question of why did these young girls perform bewitchment, why did they think they were in afflicted or at least why did they manifest the symptoms of affliction?
24:30
Odd contortions of the body, the speaking in strange voices, the writhing about, signs that we would typically associate with demonic possession, why did they do this?
25:34
Well, few people in Puritan society had less power, less of a say, less of a voice than young girls.
25:43
They were told to be quiet, they were told to sit back, they were told to ask permission before speaking, they were told to obey their mother and father at all cost.
25:53
And here is this moment where they take center stage, the spotlight is on them, and then you have the adults interpreting that for their own purposes in ways that spiral into the trials.
26:07
Next question, and this is a good one from @DreamofDelie, do we believe that witch hunting was a result of actual witches or ergot poisoning?
26:12
I think in some ways people want to believe that these girls were just low-key tripping, right, his little light LSD action, and that maybe explains it, because that's easier to understand than thinking that people really believed in witches and were really fearful of them.
26:25
When we read about people believing that witches were going to the Sabbath and having sex with the devil and committing cannibalistic infanticide and so on, we just find that beyond belief.
26:34
We think, how did people actually think this was true?
26:34
Surely the witch trials must have been about something else, social control, ergot poisoning, these sorts of things.
26:34
But in reality, this was a serious belief in the time period.
26:34
People genuinely believed in witches and they genuinely believed that people who were guilty of witchcraft needed to be eradicated from the Earth.
26:34
And there's also no evidence that they were tripping on poisoned rye.
26:34
That might have been a more exciting explanation, but the reason we know that's not true is because that would have been a lot, a lot of poisoned rye of ergot poisoning going around and the witch trials were not just in Salem.
26:34
They took place from the late 15th century through to the early 18th century.
26:34
That's tens of thousands of people accused, tens of thousands of people executed, and there's just not that much LSD bread.
26:34
Claire asks a really common question, Anne Boleyn, did she actually have six fingers?
27:27
Did she?
27:30
And I think what Claire in some ways is sort of asking is, was Anne Boleyn believed to be a witch?
27:36
Did she have these signs of witchcraft or physical difference like six fingers that could mark her out?
27:36
Well Claire, she didn't actually have six fingers, there's no contemporary evidence of that.
27:36
And actually Anne Boleyn was never accused of witchcraft during the period of her life, she was not accused of witchcraft at the time of her downfall.
27:36
She was accused of adultery, she was accused of incest, but she was never formally accused or tried as a witch.
27:36
That stuff comes later when she was demonized by later writers in various ways.
27:36
I will say, you know, what caused Anne Boleyn's downfall is frankly that Henry VIII was a megalomaniac with authoritarian tendencies who used women, abused women, and wanted to get his rocks off with Jane Seymour, one of Anne Boleyn's ladies in waiting, and Anne Boleyn had not given him a male child, hence that's really what causes her downfall, but it was not an accusation of witchcraft.
28:25
It's not really until the latter part of the 16th century where certain people start to think about Anne Boleyn, to think about her legacy and in some cases to try to tarnish it.
28:35
Elizabeth the First is in power 1558 to 1603, first female Queen of England in this way, has a tremendous amount of influence and Anne Boleyn was her mother, so if you're an enemy then trumping up charges or rumors really against Anne Boleyn is a way to do it.
28:35
At One with the Funk, a good name, how do you avoid being accused of witchcraft?
28:35
Well, number one, have a penis.
28:35
No, in all seriousness, there were about 20% of those accused of witchcraft who were men, but typically the probability was that most witches would be women because a lot of the things that happened that were attributed to witchcraft, children dying, crops dying, someone getting poisoned, a husband getting impotent, a lot of those things happened in a really domestic space, right?
28:35
Happened in the home, happened at the farm, and if you happen to be born a woman, you might want to really perform your good and godly behavior, make sure you're going to church on time, don't yell at any of your neighbors, certainly don't curse out the minister or anybody in a position of authority.
29:25
If you are engaged in any sort of neighborhood dispute, try to remove yourself from that because it's really often these neighborhood quarrels that lead eventually to witchcraft allegations when something goes wrong.
29:50
If you're in the midst of a witch panic, even if you do everything right, even if you're a man, potentially you could be accused.
29:58
We often have this assumption that if you were accused of witchcraft in this period, in, as I say, the 16th, 17th century, you would go from zero to being a witch to being executed, but in fact there were judicial processes in place that were meant to try to sort the wheat from the chaff, the witches from the good Christians as it were.
30:18
And some people in England, for example, a lot of people were afforded lawyers, there were jury trials, and you had to have a unanimous jury conviction according to England law in order to be convicted of witchcraft, and that of course meant rates of conviction in a place like England were lower.
30:32
But typically the way people were acquitted was that juries just did not find there to be enough substantive evidence that that person was truly guilty or the judge in charge of a trial decided that in fact the evidence was not there on the table to suggest that this witch had done all of these dastardly deeds.
30:48
Harry asks, why would you be convicted as a witch in the witch trials?
30:53
Let me give you a sense of how the legal process of this works.
30:57
If you're accused of witchcraft, typically it goes like this: you're accused, you're brought to some initial questioning, if there's enough material to go on, you're then brought to the trial, and over the course of both that initial questioning and the trial itself, there are depositions given by witnesses, there are questions being asked by authorities, and often some of those questions relate to crimes that you purportedly committed 10 years ago, 12 years ago.
31:26
So you might have a neighbor who tells the courts, "You know, I heard so and so was accused of witchcraft, and I remember 10 years ago we were having an argument about the boundary of our property line, and she gave me the stink eye, and then I came home later that night and my child got sicker, there was a strange swelling in my belly and I survived or they survived, but I think that was a sign she might be a witch."
31:46
Those sorts of allegations that could date back a really long time surface in the trials.
31:50
Another reason you might be convicted is if you confess.
31:52
Now Salem, let me add, is weird.
31:55
Salem is strange because most people who confess live.
31:59
Salem is unusual in this way, but in most places in Europe if you confess, you're executed, and those confessions are often elicited through the use of torture and the use of very leading questions on the part of authorities.
32:11
So you could be asked by authorities, "Didn't you go into the woods and meet with Goody Proctor at night and didn't you see this go down?"
32:19
And this intimidated person who's come from a small town and is now in this court with magistrates and ministers and so forth might just say, "Okay, yes, I guess."
32:19
And if eventually this leads to a confession, that could be enough to get you executed.
32:19
Next question is from @Whiskey456.
32:19
Whiskey, I also love whiskey.
32:19
Why do witches always get such a bad rap?
32:19
They were midwives, herbalists, and oh, powerful women.
32:19
Because there is this sort of idea that we have in popular culture that midwives are likely to be accused of witchcraft and that does show up in some of the demonological literature, right?
32:19
It does show up in the Malleus Maleficarum, right?
32:19
Watch out for midwives, watch out for how they might harm children.
32:19
In practice, midwives were very rarely accused of witchcraft because they were trusted members of the community, because you wouldn't have that position of helping deliver children into the world unless you were in fact, I would say, on average, they were less likely than your average woman because their position in society meant often that they had a good reputation and a certain level of trustworthiness, and it's only when things go really wrong that they might find the finger pointed at them.
33:27
Another great question from Reddit's Asked Historians by Cheese and Onion Crisps, did witchfinders ever find anyone innocent?
33:38
Great question, and yes, they did.
33:38
Authorities were really keen with convicting and eradicating the actual witches and it hurt their cause to convict someone who might not in their eyes be actually guilty, so there was a motivation for authorities to be somewhat judicious in this process.
33:41
And if you happen to be accused in a country with more robust judicial processes like England, for example, that gave most witches lawyers and that had unanimous jury verdicts for example, you would be more likely to be acquitted.
34:15
At Dawn Law 98346851, where did the idea of witches come from in the first place?
34:15
Once it's available, I can see that sadly it's often used maliciously by women against women, but who started the whole idea?
34:27
Dawn, there's a lot here.
34:24
I think the best way to understand the stereotype of the witch, the idea of the witch as conceived by elites at the height of the witch trials, was to see it as a sort of mixed bag of other groups and tropes that had long been objects of fear and loathing by authorities.
34:43
And by that, I mean, if you look at this witch stereotype, in it you see ideas that were anti-Semitic in origin, ideas about blood libel, harm to children.
34:55
You see ideas about heresy, people certainly believed witches were heretics.
34:55
If you serve the devil, if you worship the devil, what could be more heretical than that?
34:55
You have the idea of ritual magic as being demonic.
34:55
One of the things that happens over the course of the medieval period is that the church increasingly tries to control how people interact with the supernatural world and to deem all magic as being involving pacts with the devil.
34:55
And what really you also have happened at the start of the witch trials is the development of a court system in early modern Europe that can put laws on the books, laws in place through which to prosecute witches judicially.
34:55
So all of those things are part of this very complicated stew that eventually leads to the witch trials.
34:55
Now, a really interesting point that you make here about women accusing other women, some scholars I think wrongly have used the fact that this happened, women were often accusing other women, to say, you know, the trials weren't really about gender, they didn't really have anything to do with this.
35:51
When in fact, of course, it makes sense that women would accuse other women, right?
35:55
Most of these things, these initial allegations of witchcraft start in the home.
35:59
She poisoned my baby, she did something to my husband, she made it impossible for me to churn my butter.
36:05
I also want to say that if you're in the midst of a very intense witch hunt, it is safer if you're a woman to be on the side of helping identify who the accused witches were.
36:14
Now this is not to say that that was being done cynically, women also believed most witches were women.
36:21
This is the way these ideas work, when something becomes a norm, everybody buys into it to a large extent.
36:29
It might start with one woman accusing another woman of using various household objects to poison a child, but then when it gets to the authorities who are really interested in what the devil's up to on Earth, they might ask the accused witch, "Where did you meet Satan in the woods?
36:39
You had this ability to poison, how did you get it?
36:47
Did you enter into a pact with the devil?"
36:44
And it is, I think, that elite male interest in the devil and in sex with the devil and these sorts of questions where you really start to see things shift in the trials.
36:54
At Simon Antihero, witch hunting never ends.
36:56
It doesn't.
36:59
So if we're looking at the timeline of witch hunting, the last witches are formally tried in England in the 1680s, the last witch is formally tried in Scotland in the 1720s, and even in Central Europe as late as the 1780s.
37:11
People had questions about the realism and efficacy of the crime of witchcraft, particularly authorities became skeptical of that, and laws were taken off the books in the 18th century, so witchcraft laws, so witchcraft as we think it historically, ended.
37:11
But witch hunting hasn't ended, this ended, this tendency to demonize and dehumanize others and sort of associate them with very old and dangerous tropes persists in really profound ways.
37:11
At Meg D West asks, apparently I've never seen Hocus Pocus, why did I not know that witches were the bad guys?
37:11
Number one, Hocus Pocus, 10 out of 10, I love that movie, it's kitschy as hell, what a delight.
37:11
I watch it every year, I've seen it like 30 times.
37:11
But why did I not know witches were the bad guys?
37:11
Well, that's, you know, a really interesting point, it sort of raises the question for us of if in the pre-modern period people were scared of witches, they thought they were evil servants, Satan, deadly, why now do we have these kind of cuddly witches in Hocus Pocus or in the series Bewitched or in lots of other sorts of venues, Charmed, Practical Magic, why do we have cute little toddlers wearing witches hats at Halloween, why?
38:28
The reason is because there's been as we become more skeptical, as we've decided that in fact maybe the devil's not that active in the world and maybe that there are different modes of spirituality that are appropriate, maybe there are different ways that women are allowed to be in the world, there's been almost a witch renaissance, a sort of reclaiming of that label and a real interest actually in ideas about magic among the populist.
38:52
So I think it really is our modern depictions that, that do in some ways come out of the, the 1970s and this sort of feminist rethinking of how we ought to conceive of and perceive witches.
39:03
Thank you everyone for these fantastic questions.
39:06
Clearly there is so much to say about witches, but that's all we have time for today.
39:11
Thank you for watching Witchcraft support.