Lindstrom, Essay #8, Question #5, Page #1 Nathan W.

Lindstrom Professor Gatlin History 4A 2012-02-24

The 1500s and early 1600s were not kind to women. From the oppression fostered by new religious offshoots of the Catholic Church, such as the Anabaptists, to the outright torture and murder under the guise of witch hunting, women in the sixteenth century faced a great deal of danger at the hands of a largely misogynistic society. With the advent of paranoia and fear toward witches, women in the margins of society, such as the poor and single, were often defenseless against the religious and superstitious mania sweeping throughout the land. The Anabaptists were a sect that arose out of the Protestant movement who believed that only adults possessed the free will necessary to accept baptism, and therefore practiced a second baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the legal codes of the day (MW, pp.479-480). One group of Anabaptists took over the German town of Mnster and immediately set about engaging any many practices which we see mirrored even today in some religious cults. Among their more oppressive practices was to engage in polygamy, patterning themselves after the Old Testament patriarchs by having multiple wives. For the town of Mnster this ended in disaster when in 1535 the city fell in battle to a combined Catholic and Protestant army. Most of the Anabaptist men and many of the women were killed, including one notable woman, Hille Feiken, who while suffering from religious brainwashing attempted to follow the example of the mythical Judith and was beheaded for her troubles (MW, p. 473, 480). The Protestants themselves imposed harsher limitations on women than the Catholics. For example, Protestant women were expected to be

Lindstrom, Essay #8, Question #5, Page #2 obedient wives, and were no longer free to pursue religion on their own, nor were they permitted to join a convent (MW, p. 484). While some women, both Catholic and Protestant, enjoyed more freedom than the average woman of the day, they were largely part of the aristocratic and wealthy classesa pattern continued from as far back as the early Greek city-states. Despite the rise in scientific and logical reasoning during this period, a wholly irrational fear of witches arose and gripped the land. In France alone, between the years 1550 and 1650, more than three hundred anti-witchcraft books and pamphlets appeared (MW, p.517). Over 100,000 witch trials were held in Europe and North America, with some 80 per cent of the accused being women. Approximately 33 per cent of those tried were sentenced to death (MW, p. 518). Nowhere is the anti-witch fervor better exemplified than in the torture and murder of Suzanne Gaudry. The trial of Guadry was held in 1652 in Riex-Volvestre, a commune in Southern France. Gaudry, an older woman accused of witchcraft, was

repeatedly tortured and several times confessed under duress, confessions which she then later recanted. As the tortures continue, she becomes

increasingly less lucid, and at one point asked who was alongside her, touching her, yet none of those present could see anyone there (Sources, p. 229). Rather than seeing this occurrence for what it was, viz., an old woman going insane thanks to imprisonment, torture, and fear, the men in charge tacitly chalked her experience up to the supernatural and dumped her back in prison. The verdict handed down in Guadrys case colorfully illustrates the degree to which the inmates were in charge of the asylum. They cited four reasons for their conviction of Guadry: first, that she had confessed, never mind the horrendous circumstances of her supposed confessions. Second, it appeared that she had always been a witch, or at least, rather witch-like. Third, out of fear of being apprehended by the law she had fleda

Lindstrom, Essay #8, Question #5, Page #3 wonderful example of circular logic at its best. And fourth, her close family had also been tried and executed for being witches (Sources, pp. 229-230). It is a safe assumption that her family was convicted on the same kind of evidence that condemned Guadry, and to hang a woman based upon these four reasons is an exercise in unmitigated insanity. Sadly, it was not until 1682 that a French royal decree declared witchcraft as fraud and imposture, bring to a close a dark period for womens rights (MW, p. 520).