>The estimates of millions of women killed in the witch
>hunt are a rad fem myth. That would have been a
>demographic and human disaster on the scale of the
>Black Death, or worse, which killed 1/3 to 1/2 the
>European population in 1347-52, and there is zippo
>support for such a catastrophe, which, among other
>things, would have lead to a vast missing population
>that aint there. It took Europe two and a half to
>three centuries to recover, demographically, from the
>plague, but it had recovered by the time of the witch
>craze (1550-1670).
Some estimates have the population of Germany halved by the 30 Years War (starting 1618). So I don't know where you're finding all this stability in population. (In Germany that's followed by a high birth rate, higher than the rest of Europe, and they apparently restore pre-war population within the next century, so that argues against industrial quantity 'witch'-killing while it might bolster the anti-contraception explanations.)
>There is no evidence of a sharp upward pressure on
>wages or shortage of labor in the period thereafter,
>such as is clearly recorded after the Plague of the
>14th century -- when, for example, England passed a
>vagabondage law making it unlawful for an able-bodied
>person to be unemployed. The real death toll (and and
>women) for the European witch craze probably do not
>exceed the mid-high tens of thousands, maybe less,
>though historical demography is a tricky business.
Estimates go from 30,000 to several million. I can't argue the varying credibility of sources on towns having wiped out their entire female population (Trier is one town I remember). I'm pretty sure they preceed second wave feminism, though. Arguing that it couldn't have happened on such a scale locally because it would've caused economic chaos is not, unfortunately, evidence of much when it comes to the Church in Europe. Even their own inquisitors get the stake occasionally. Just because we haven't figured out a materialist explanation doesn't mean it couldn't happen, it just means we haven't figured it out.
>The idea that it was some some of attempt by the
>medical profession to assert control over healing by
>wiping out the competition is not plausible -- the
>medical profession (a) didn't have that sort of clout
>and (b) didn't treat the peasants, who couldn't for
>the most part afford the fees, and (c) would have been
>opposed by men needing spouses, coworkers, and a
>general recognition that killing women is bad for the
>labor supply (in a society where children were also
>your social security and infant mortality was about
>50% and death in childbirth probably about 35%.)
Well, there's the question of the ratio of the sexes--if there were a lot more women than men, due to wars, then you might have a different situation than that which you are describing. That maternal mortality rate sounds high to me. When male doctors started to make considerable inroads in the nineteenth century (and started spreading puerperal fever) it *increased* the maternal mortality rate to one in 20.
I agree that the argument that there was a threat to the 'medical profession' is weak, since there wasn't much of a medical profession. (Maybe someone else made that argument here?) I was repeating Jules Michelet's (1958) argument that it was the *church* that was threatened. If afflictions were brought by god as punishment, you could see that curing them might be undermining of doctrine and authority. Among those afflictions (or gifts from god, depending on how you look at it) would be unrelieved childbearing.
>Nor
>does killing women en masse because some of them
>practiced abortion and taught contraception make any
>sense -- in fact I don't know of any witch trials
>where these chars were brought up, as opposed to, Dame
>Jill cursed my cow, that srt of thing.
Yes, that would be a simplistic argument. More likely they were trying to stamp out the earlier religions and one of the claims to credibility of these may have been effectiveness in controlling fertility, which is big if you're poor. Infant mortality (actually it's child mortality that would've been around 50%) doesn't speak to the question of women having to constantly BEAR all those dying children (and seeking not to do that). Indeed, constant childbearing decreases the chances that any given child will survive because of maternal exhaustion, not to mention family food supply. There's evidence that childbearing was better controlled in Europe during this period than it was later, the first line of defense being coitus interruptus. The number of recipes for abortifacients and emmenagogues in contemporary herbals is remarkable, though, so someone was testing them and using them. Many have ingredients which are now known to be abortifacient, so they weren't just talismans. And then there is also this odd gap in contraceptive knowledge I mentioned earlier (noted by John Riddle in his short history of contraception and abortion). That speaks more to effect than cause, however it indicates that there was considerable knowledge to be lost.
Jenny Brown