Chris:
>I am certainly open to being persuaded otherwise, as I
don't know very much on the subject, but I am
skeptical about claims that the witch hunts were
motivated by the Church's authority being undermined
by efficacious medical cures on the part of village
women and so forth. That seems really farfetched to
me. How do we know that these women even existed, and
especially how do we know that their presumed cures
were efficacious? Did they leave medical records? And
the Church was a mighty institution that I don't think
would feel threatened by some hicks in the village.
Except that it wasn't very firmly situated if people were pretty much ignoring its authority when they had a real problem, and going to other sources of knowledge and 'cunning.' We know these women existed, not because they left medical records (many were illiterate), but because the male doctors that followed them did, sometimes citing to them as the source of their knowledge of plants and diseases. They were the midwives, wise women, referred to in plenty of contemporary texts. Indeed, there is little record in medical texts and herbals of experimentation by the authors themselves. They were relying on the folk experience of generations, and writing it down, often without specifying dosages or recording what part of the plant should be used.
Also, there is kind of a mystery about why so much folk knowledge was lost, especially with respect to contraception and abortion, between the Medieval writers and the Renaissance writers. Possibly many of their living sources were tortured and burned.
But that's not the only possible explanation for this massive outbreak of torturing and killing of women (at the height of it, it was truly gynocidal, in some villages all the women were killed, or all but one). There were plenty of stirred up 'hicks' at various points revolting and generally causing the church and lords significant pains, so things weren't exactly going swimmingly for them right then. Then there were population pressures in a generally inflexible and unproductive system. In the 70s Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English made the claim in that witches were targeted for their distribution of effective contraceptive information and potions. (As Charles notes, abortion and contraception are alluded to in the Malleus Malificarum.)
Someone who's more conversant with church history than I am could probably set this straight, but it's my understanding that the devil-on-earth was specifically reintroduced as a concept as a precursor to the witch crazes. While before, wise women were an irritation with their potions and alleged spells and whatnot, they get elevated to witches, a real threat (and not to believe in them was heresy) in the late 1400s. They were supposed to be the devil's consorts since women are, as everyone knows, sexually insatiable.
Jenny Brown