some historians to explore the role of gender in the early modern witch-hunts. Feminist
historian, Anne Barstow, proposed that the witch-hunts were an attack on women and
accused other historians of witchcraft of having ‘no awarene ss of traditional misogyny or
traditional oppression of women.’
Rather than seeing the witch-hunts as evidence of female oppression, Barstow
claimed that other historians have instead concluded that women were accused of
witchcraft through some fault of their own. To support her argument, Barstow drew on
studies where a high majority of those accused were women, such as Macfarlane’s study on
Essex. 6 However, as observed by Robin Briggs in his book Witches & Neighbours , this was not
always the case, with men making up the majority of the accused in places such as Paris and
Iceland, and relatively high proportions of men were accused in places such as south-west
Germany. 7 Despite this, Barstow argued that the men who were accused of and tried for
witchcraft were so due to other crimes that they had committed or to their association with
suspected female witches, and she maintained that women were ‘overwhelmingly singled
out’. 8
Further disagreement has emerged regarding the types of women who were accused
of witchcraft, with arguments advanced by some historians that women with certain
occupations were more vulnerable to accusations. In addition to ‘black’ magic performed by
witches, there were contemporary beliefs in ‘white’ magic, performed by folk healers, a lso
known as cunning folk or wise women and wise men. Research has shown that wise women
6 Anne L. Barstow, 'On Studying Witchcraft as Women's History: A Historiography of the European Witch Persecutions', Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion , 4. 2 (1988), p. 7-19 7 Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 225-226 8 Barstow, p. 9
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