From sorcery to witchcraft

Notes from Bailey, M. (2001). From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages. Speculum, 76(4), pp.960-990.

Prior to the fifteenth century, magic was thought to be performed by educated males who performed intricate rituals. In Nider's Formicarius, the witch is described as uneducated and more commonly female.

‘To modern minds, the single most immediately apparent element of the witch stereotype was that, throughout the long era of the great hunts, the vast majority of those tried, and can even greater percentage of those executed, for the crime of witchcraft were female’ (Bailey, 2001)

How this aspect of magic became feminised. An important part of the answer lies in the conflation of elite and common beliefs about magic the has been the focus here and in the changing conceptions of what magic required and entailed that emerged from this conflation.

Surviving court records from the 14th century reveal that in trials for maleficium prior to 1350, as notions of common sorcery and necromancy were only beginning to collide, men constituted over 70 percent of the accused, and this decided majority may well reflect a prejudice on the part of authorities against believing that women could also be capable of such crimes. After all, the system of magic that these authorities understood were concerned about what was essentially learned necromancy, which, insofar as it was mainly a clerical form of magic, was therefore also mainly a male form of magic. Certainly women had long been active in the common tradition of medieval magic as village healers, wise women, and soothsayers, but such women could hardly be suspected of anything like learned necromancy. They had neither the training to perform such acts nor, in the view of most clerical authorities, the capacity for such knowledge. However, as authorities began to perceive a system whereby simple, uneducated people might also gain terrible power over demons [targeted by the devil as victims against their will] indeed far greater power than even learned necromancers wielded - in other words as the idea of witchcraft emerged more clearly out of earlier ideas about sorcery - they could come more and more readily to accept the idea that women might also be active in this crime, and ultimately they could convince themselves that women were far more inclined toward witchcraft than men were.

In the second half of the 14th century, the percentage of men accused fell to 42 percent... In the early 15th century the percentage of women continued to rise to between 60 and 70 percent. Finally, during the era of the great witch hunts in the 16th and 17th centuries, over 80 percent of the victims were women, and many of the men who went to the stake were associated with female witches in some way, most often as their husbands or sons.  

Yet many of the arguments that the malleus would later repeat, especially concerning the particular female susceptibility to evil based on long-standing Christian doctrines about women’s mental and spiritual weakness and heightened carnality, had already been made half a century earlier by the Dominican Johannes Nider.

Nader was the earliest ecclesiastical authority to state explicitly that witchcraft was an especially feminine crime. …He then went on to give several explanations for why women were more inclined to witchcraft than were men, all focusing on women’s inferior physical, mental and moral capacity.

…Witchcraft…was based on the submission and subservience to Satan - characteristically female qualities... 

Lots of writers) …then linked witchcraft to feminine spiritual weakness, and particularly to female susceptibility to the carnal temptations of the devil…

‘For a phenomenon so complex and multifaceted in its origin, no one cause or single explanation can fully suffice.’ (Bailey, 2001. p.988)

Changing attitudes toward magic and medieval notions of magic. 

Argues that the common understanding of sorcery and necromancy were pushed together, the lines between them blurred and a misunderstanding resulting in a development of the idea of witchcraft. 

In a sense, then, the idea of sorcery came full circle through the Middle Ages. In the late-antique and early-medieval periods, as Christianity imposed itself on classical and pagan systems of magic, ecclesiastical authorities emphasised the demonic nature of most magic, and thus condemned most non-Christian ritual.