Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Most of those accused during the European witch hunt were peasant women. Scholars began studying this phenomenon more deeply because of the second-wave feminist movement, while Marxist scholars have ignored witch-hunting’s significance:

What has not been recognized is that the witch-hunt was one of the most important events in the development of a capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry (165).

This development created more gender division because it inspired misogynistic fear of women. Witch-hunting also attacked traditional folk practices that medieval society had tolerated.

Elite responses to peasant rebellions (which occurred when feudalism broke down) sparked the witch hunts. Witchcraft became a form of heresy and a religious and secular crime subject to capital punishment. Witchcraft convictions rose as the Spanish subjugated large swaths of the Americas.

Witch-hunting was a political enterprise. States engaged in practices that inspired communities to turn on their members. Printed propaganda, including demonological treatises, fueled this “mass psychosis.” Religion played an important role, too. Indeed, witch-hunting served as a “unifying” political tool for European states because it was international in scope.