Thanks for the info Jenny. Couple questions.
1. How was their population pressure in Europe in the late 1400s? It was only a century after the Black Death wiped out half of the pop?
2. I don't see allusions to abortion or contraception in the MM, at least in Innocent's Bull. He says things _that could be interpreted as_ allusions to abortion or contraception. (I translated the Bull into Russian last night for the benefit of the workstaff at the bar where I was. ;) )
3. Why were these wise women only women, why were there no wise men? (Or perhaps there were, and the witch-hunters didn't target them.) BTW the old woman in the village with the arcane lore is still around in Eastern Europe -- my ex-girlfriend saw one when her son was born sick.
4. Interesting that Innocent focuses on northern Germany, an area that IIRC had not become Christian that long before. I imagine there might still have been remnants of the pagan religion around (which would be Thor and Loki worship, I suppose).
--- JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>
> 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
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