How the Printing Press Ignited Europe’s Deadly Witch-Hunt Frenzy
And why this is a cautionary tale for the digital age
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Throughout history, dating as far back as ancient times, women often held roles as healers, priestesses, midwives, nurses, physicians, medical educators, and herbalists.
And initially, these ‘wise women’ were neither feared nor demonised.
In fact, they were widely accepted and revered by their communities for their skills and knowledge — the secrets of both bringing life into the world and keeping death at bay — which they then passed down from mother to daughter for generations. Even women who openly practised witchcraft — a belief in which can also be traced back to the ancient world, like Roman and Greek mythology or Celtic folklore — were at first respected for their wisdom. But there was an element of fear surrounding their power, too.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind. Whether they were witches or not, these women’s craft wasn’t just a source of employment but also of a certain degree of power in a world which slowly but surely was coming under the rule of men.
Although in ancient Egypt, for instance, women could study, teach, and practice medicine — some cities, like Sais, even had schools specialising in midwifery — over time, women were pushed out of formal practice and forced to move their skills into the privacy of their homes. But eventually, even their own homes were no longer safe havens for continuing the practices their ancestors had upheld for centuries.
This shift was fuelled by several coinciding factors, but it actually wouldn’t have been possible without one of humanity’s greatest inventions: the printing press.
The printing press originated in China and was invented by a man named Bi Sheng. But, thanks to historical bias in favour of the West, you’re probably more familiar with Johannes Gutenberg, the German goldsmith credited with creating the first modern printing press around 1440 CE.
And it was Gutenberg’s invention that played a significant role in Europe in the centuries that followed, enabling ideas, news, and knowledge to be shared far and wide, which then contributed to the spread of education, literacy, and, as many argue, the Renaissance.
But it also helped to spread something else: prejudice, social polarisation and even violence. In particular, against women.
Now, it’s true that some early Christian church fathers, like Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, began to look at women who had even a little bit of power, knowledge, or pagan audacity — female healers, midwives, herbalists, etc. — with growing suspicion from around the 4th century CE. But their ideas weren’t exactly quick to spread. Most people were illiterate, religious sermons were delivered in Latin, and written works — also frequently in Latin — weren’t easily accessible to the general public.
Luckily for some, and very unlucky for tens of thousands soon accused of being ‘witches’, Gutenberg’s machine arrived just as these ideas took a dark turn. Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of the Witches’), possibly the most misogynous text ever written, was published in 1486 — right when the first printing shops were spreading across Europe. Written by two Dominican priests, the text served as a witch-hunting manual, its title not-so-subtly signalling its purpose: enforcing Exodus 22:18, ‘You shall not permit a sorceress to live.’
Unfortunately, it was hardly the only text encouraging people to identify, interrogate and prosecute those believed to be in league with the devil. The popular press quickly hopped on the trend, too, churning out countless one-page pamphlets and broadsheets — the precursors of modern newspapers — devoted to sensationalist ‘news’ stories of women flying on oven forks, burning towns and eating children. These were often accompanied by exaggerated, brightly coloured illustrations featuring topless ‘witches’ and equally attention-grabbing headlines, which historian Natalie Grace once described as ‘the early modern equivalent of clickbait.’ The stories themselves were also essentially the modern equivalent of fake news.
Still, they were popular with the general population and highly profitable for the booming printing industry. So what’s the harm, right?
Well, according to a recent study published in Theory and Society, the printing of texts about witchcraft and witch-hunting, particularly the Malleus Maleficarum, played a crucial role in spreading the persecution of women suspected of witchcraft across Europe. After analysing data from 553 cities in Central Europe between 1400 and 1679, the researchers observed a significant increase in both the frequency and intensity of witch trials following the publication of each new edition of the Malleus Maleficarum and other similar texts.
The following graph from the study illustrates this trend clearly:
The study also highlighted that as one city adopted the witch-hunting practices outlined in the manuals, neighbouring cities quickly followed suit, learning from each other’s actions.
Eventually, these ideas and ‘best practices’ spread like wildfire across the continent, resulting in thousands of women being branded as the personification of the ‘absolute devil.’
In total, it’s estimated that the witch-hunt frenzy, which took off in the late 15th century and lasted for 300 years (the last known official witch trial took place in my homeland, Poland, in 1783), led to the prosecution of roughly 90,000 people, with nearly 45,000 executions. The vast majority of those accused and sentenced to death were women — particularly those who had attained a certain degree of power or popularity in their communities, elderly women, widows, poor women, and those deemed of ‘ill repute,’ such as women who had children out of wedlock or were believed to engage in ‘lewd’ and ‘promiscuous’ behaviour.
At no other point in history have women faced such a large-scale, legally sanctioned, and religiously endorsed campaign of violent misogyny as during the period of European witch hunts. As Silvia Federici writes in her recent book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women:
On the flimsiest evidence, generally nothing more than a denunciation, thousands were arrested, stripped naked, completely shaved, and then pricked with long needles in every part of their bodies in search of the ‘Devil’s mark,’ often in the presence of men, from the executioner to the local notables and priests.
And this was by no means the end of their torments. The most sadistic tortures ever invented were inflicted on the body of the woman accused, which provided an ideal laboratory for the development of a science of pain and torture.
If it weren’t for the invention of the printing press, perhaps the prejudice against women whose only ‘crime’ was straying from the increasingly rigid ideals of femininity wouldn’t have escalated to such horrifying proportions. But it’s not the technology itself that we should blame here. Because it wasn’t a random printing press that woke up one day and decided to terrorise women through fantastic accusations, horrendous torture and public executions. It was a few men armed with hatred and fear of women they viewed as ‘dangerous.’
Women played a part in the witch hunts, too, though it was a passive one. They were coerced — typically through torture and at the hands of men — into denouncing other women, including close friends, or risk being burned at the stake themselves. This also effectively tore apart the female networks of cooperation and sociality that had been the basis of women’s social power in earlier centuries. However, that was just one of the many tragic consequences of the witch hunts.
As demonstrated by, for instance, historian Carolyn Merchant and journalists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, the witch hunts forced women to abandon the vast body of knowledge that generations of women before them had acquired — knowledge of nature, medicine, spirituality and, perhaps most crucially, the female body. This, unfortunately, is what propaganda does. It suppresses the ‘old’ to make way for the ‘new’, which, in this case, was the suppression of female social power, knowledge and cultural practices in favour of full submission to male and institutional control, particularly within the nuclear family.
The demonisation of the ‘witch’ was also instrumental in designating the realm of ‘acceptable’ female behaviour — sexless, tamed, domesticated, and viewed as having one primary function: to produce an abundant workforce. Martin Luther, the German priest and religious reformer who also enthusiastically called for the slaughter of alleged witches from the pulpit, once reportedly declared, ‘Let them [women] bear children to death. They are created for that.’
And should women choose not to follow this path of ‘ideal’ femininity, well, the brutal torture and death of the witch served as a stark warning of what could happen.
This was all accompanied by increasingly misogynistic institutional policies, laws and regulations that stripped women of their autonomy and pushed them out of certain industries and professions, culminating in the Victorian ‘cult of true womanhood’ and the ideology of separate spheres.
But sadly, misogynistic propaganda is still alive and well even today.
It just spreads through a different medium.
Over the years, I’ve frequently written about the rise of misogynistic discourse online. What’s particularly disturbing is that it’s not just slurs and silly stereotypes scattered across the web uttered by kids or bored teenagers who don’t know better.
There are whole websites and forums — collectively referred to as the ‘manosphere’ — where men fabricate and spread misogynistic theories about women, their allegedly inferior nature, and their supposed place in society. These modern-day inquisitors and demonologists also tend to portray women as creatures of hell, man-eaters, baby killers and scapegoats for all of society’s ills. Some of this rhetoric is even cloaked in the guise of ‘scientific evidence,’ relying on misunderstood evolutionary theories, fake graphs, and misleading statistics. Social media platforms then trap boys and men in misogynistic echo chambers, where these beliefs are continually reinforced as algorithms are designed to show users more of the same content they’ve previously engaged with.
It’s really not an exaggeration to say that parts of the Internet essentially serve as the modern equivalent of Malleus Maleficarum.
But this problem isn’t just confined to online spaces either.
Misogynistic prejudices, misinformation, and scapegoating are rife in traditional media — particularly in right-leaning outlets — in politics and even in policies passed by some governments, too. Single mothers are blamed for destroying the ‘sanctity’ of the nuclear family. Childless and childfree women are harassed for failing to fulfil their ‘one true purpose.’ Women in typically ‘masculine’ roles, especially in leadership positions, are accused of stealing ‘men’s jobs’ and deemed ‘unfit’ for their roles. And so the list goes on and on.
It’s not exactly difficult to see disturbing parallels with the distant past in all of this, is it? Still, just because today’s misogyny might not seem as bad, we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it as harmless.
The history of witch trials clearly shows us what happens when technology-fueled misogynistic propaganda gets out of control. It can terrorise entire societies, isolate its victims, discourage resistance, and make people follow along because ‘everyone else is doing it.’ And it doesn’t just lead to social polarisation, but to violence. We might not be burning women at stake anymore, but the rates of gender-based intimate partner violence, sexual violence and online harassment remain staggering.
There’s still one narrow path of ‘acceptable’ female behaviour, and any woman who dares stray from it pays a price.
However, let’s not forget that while technologies can become tools of violence and persecution, they can also spur positive change. The same print technology that helped fuel the witch hunts eventually spread mass literacy and education and, in turn, helped challenge the harmful superstitions around witchcraft and women.
Technologies aren’t inherently good or bad — they just are. It’s how we use them that matters most.
Every now and then, I stop and think, ‘oh, yes, I would have definitely been burned at the stake, locked in an asylum, or forced to undergo lobotomy if I had been born in any other period.’
As I write this last bit, I’m drinking herbs — a mix of dandelion, nettle, camomile, melissa, peppermint and nettle. I also grow my own herbs. I own a black cat. I don’t have children. But perhaps worst of all, I’m educated and speak my mind as often as I please. You’d be surprised (or maybe not, if you’re a fellow Woman on the Internet) how many men are angered by my very existence and voice.
Just like for so many women before me, my craft is a source of employment, yes, but it also gives me power in this world.
And that’s still terrifying to some, thanks to the same old misogynistic propaganda that should really become a relic of the past.
Women’s reproductive rights in the hands of male relugious zealouts - still terrifying. This fantastic piece draws me to think how women have forgotten or deny their body wisdom & power but DEEP down they hear the witch whispering within. 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
This was fascinating. I would have never thought to connect the printing press and witchhunts. And I appreciate the way you thread the needle between that and the modern day online echo chambers of toxic masculinity.