Women, Witch Trials and the Healer Myth

The image is powerful: a woman understands plants, childbirth and the body; frightened authorities call her a witch; her knowledge is burned with her.

This happened to some people. It is not an adequate explanation for the European witch hunts as a whole.

The history is more complicated, but not less damning. Tens of thousands of people were executed after accusations shaped by fear, theology, law, torture, local conflict and gendered ideas about who could become an agent of evil.

The witch hunts were profoundly gendered

Across early modern Europe as a whole, historians generally estimate that roughly four out of five people accused of witchcraft were women. The proportion varied sharply by region: in some areas women formed more than ninety percent of defendants, while in Muscovite Russia and parts of the Nordic world men could form a majority or a large minority.

Variation does not make gender irrelevant. It helps identify the local ideas that made particular kinds of people vulnerable.

Learned demonology increasingly portrayed witchcraft as a pact with the Devil. Influential writers connected women with moral weakness, uncontrolled sexuality and susceptibility to demonic temptation. These ideas did not create every village accusation, but they helped courts and churches imagine the stereotypical witch as female.

Gender also shaped ordinary conflict. Women were frequently responsible for food, childcare, nursing, neighbourly exchange and household survival — roles in which illness, death, hunger and refusal could become socially charged. A quarrel followed by misfortune could be remembered as a curse.

There was no single type of accused woman

The popular picture of the elderly, isolated widow reflects real patterns in some regions, especially where poverty and dependence made women vulnerable. But trial records also contain married women, younger women, servants, women with property, mothers, migrants and members of respected families.

Accusations could grow from disputes over charity, inheritance, reputation, sexuality, livestock, illness, failed harvests or the death of a child. Some defendants were already known for magical or healing services. Others had no such reputation before suspicion formed around them.

It is therefore misleading to replace one stereotype — the Devil’s servant — with another — the universally independent wise woman. Both turn thousands of different lives into a single character.

Were healers, herbalists and midwives accused?

Yes. People who offered healing, charms, divination, childbirth assistance or protective magic could face suspicion. A healer who was believed capable of removing supernatural harm might also be imagined capable of causing it. A failed treatment, maternal death or infant death could become evidence in a hostile retelling.

Early modern boundaries between medicine, household remedy, prayer, charm and magic were not the boundaries used today. Many ordinary people used mixtures of practical knowledge, religious language and ritual action without seeing themselves as members of a separate pagan profession.

What the evidence does not support is a Europe-wide programme designed chiefly to eliminate female medical knowledge or an organised class of pagan priestess-healers. Historians who study trial records have repeatedly challenged that sweeping account.

Some midwives and healers were accused. Many accused women were not healers. Many healers were never accused. Men also worked as healers and magical practitioners, and in some regions men dominated witchcraft prosecutions.

Knowledge could make a woman vulnerable. Womanhood itself could make many different kinds of knowledge, anger and independence look dangerous.

Why the persecuted-healer story became so powerful

During the twentieth century, feminist writers reclaimed the witch as a symbol of women punished for autonomy, sexuality, knowledge and resistance. That symbol named something historically true: the hunts reflected misogyny and enforced gendered expectations.

The healer narrative also offered an ancestral story for women excluded from professional medicine and religious authority. It transformed victims once depicted as monstrous into custodians of care and ecological knowledge.

As political memory, the story can be meaningful. As a universal historical explanation, it becomes a problem.

The myth can also create unsafe assumptions about herbal remedies by treating suppressed tradition as automatically effective. Historical plant knowledge deserves study, but age and persecution do not prove medical efficacy or safety.

Churches, states, courts and neighbours

It is tempting to describe the witch hunts as one campaign by “the Church.” Religious theology was central, and clergy, inquisitors and confessional conflict contributed to persecution. Yet much European witch-hunting was prosecuted in secular courts, under both Catholic and Protestant governments.

Formal institutions turned suspicion into imprisonment, torture, conviction and execution. But accusations often began within communities. Neighbours, relatives and local officials supplied stories of curses, illness and suspicious behaviour.

This does not absolve institutions. A rumour becomes a judicial killing only when systems of law and authority accept its premises and methods. Courts could restrain panics, demand evidence and overturn convictions; they could also intensify fear through torture and the search for accomplices.

The machinery also produced exceptions. In seventeenth-century Muscovy, most of the accused were men. In other regions, family relationships pulled men into trials alongside female relatives. Such cases reveal that gendered persecution worked through particular cultures rather than a universal biological script.

What Pagan Earth chooses to remember

We will not deny the role of women’s knowledge. Household remedies, birth work, food preservation, plant observation and informal care were essential forms of expertise, often undervalued because they were carried outside male institutions.

We will also not make every accused woman prove her worth by becoming a secret expert.

A poor woman, an angry neighbour, a dependent widow, a frightened confessor or a socially disliked person did not need to possess lost wisdom to deserve life and dignity. The injustice was not that authorities sometimes killed useful women. The injustice was that fear and power made imagined supernatural guilt punishable at all.

Remembering them accurately teaches a wider lesson: societies can turn ordinary vulnerability, difference and conflict into evidence of hidden danger. The language changes. The mechanism does not vanish.