Book: Women At Stake Interpretations Of Women Role In Witchcraft And Witch Hunts by Raisa Maria Toivo
Soon after the witch trials died out in the western world, the wise men of the enlightenment invented a figure of 9 million witches that burned on the stakes. The 9 million witches were supposed to have been old, sick and poor women, suspect because of their deviant age and looks but essentially harmless victims of the horrid and cruel Dark Ages. The numbers have since come down to 100 000 trials and 40 000-50 000 executions between 1450 and 1700 and the social characteristics of the witches, too have become less distinctly deviant. The proportion of women among the accused, however, is still considered notable: traditionally a rough 2/3 in the Western Europe, whereas in the eastern "peripheries" the majority of witches were male. During the last two decades, this picture has been changing, too, and a growing proportion of witches even in the Western Europe has turned out to have been male.1 Some recent historians have even claimed that the proportion of men among the accused has been deliberately downplayed. 2 Despite the growing number of men who have been found to have been accused in witch-trials in various parts of Europe, the image of a woman-hunt persists in popular feminisms. Academic historians, as well as modern feminist scholars have also produced a variety of answers to the everintriguing question why so many of the accused witches were female and – more recently - what this reveals us about the role of women in early modern society. The image of a witch has been pregnant with meaning throughout the history of women’s and feminist studies in the 20th and early 21st centuries and the historiography echoes important themes in the women’s and feminist studiesFree eBooks (Can Be Downloaded):
John Campbell Colquhoun - An History Of Magic Witchcraft And Animal MagnetismAllen Greenfield - The Secret History Of Modern Witchcraft
George Lincoln Burr - Narratives Of The Witchcraft Cases
Raisa Maria Toivo - Women At Stake Interpretations Of Women Role In Witchcraft And Witch Hunts
