The figure of the witch, as she haunts our collective imagination, is a caricature forged in fire and fear. She is the crone with a poisoned apple, the woman who consorts with demons, the malevolent outsider bent on corrupting the pious. But when we scrape away the soot of superstition, we find a far more revealing and politically potent figure.

The historical “witch” was, more often than not, a woman whose real-world knowledge and social role posed a direct threat to emerging structures of ecclesiastical, patriarchal, and economic power. To trace the witch’s lineage is to uncover a protracted war over the control of the body, nature, and the very right to know.

The terms “witch,” “healer,” and “heretic” were deliberately conflated to devastating effect. A village wise woman, or weise frau, was not inherently an adversary of the Church. Her domain was the material world: she understood the cycles of the moon for planting, the properties of local herbs for poultices and potions, and the processes of childbirth. This practical knowledge was passed down through generations, often orally, forming a vital commons of care that existed outside formal, male-dominated institutions.

The demonisation of this figure was no accident. We can see the witch hunts as a form of primitive accumulation, an “enclosure” not of land but of knowledge and bodily autonomy. The question is not what supernatural powers these women possessed, but what material resources they controlled. Who benefited from their eradication?

The answer lies with the university-trained physician seeking a monopoly on healing, the Church Father demanding a monopoly on salvation, and the patrilineal state requiring a monopoly on women’s reproductive capacity. The slippage from “healer” to “heretic” was the ideological mechanism that transformed community-based skill into a capital crime.

The Commons of Folk Knowledge

Before the great witch hunts, European peasant life was a mix of practices that blended the practical and the sacred. Knowledge of plants like pennyroyal for regulating menstruation, ergot for inducing labour, or belladonna for pain relief was the province of women. This was not “magic” in a supernatural sense, but applied ecology—a deep, localised understanding of the natural pharmacopoeia. Midwives did not merely deliver babies; they understood fertility, contraception, and, when necessary, abortion. They were the guardians of life.

This created an inherent tension with the early Church, which was slowly consolidating its cosmological and intellectual authority. A cosmology where nature was alive with spirit and accessible to all, through experience and tradition, was a direct rival to one where divine grace flowed exclusively through the sacraments administered by a male priesthood. The first step in the long campaign against the healer was the Church’s systematic devaluation of oral, female-coded knowledge in favour of written, Latin, male-coded doctrine.

The 12th century marked a critical turning point with the rise of universities. These institutions, from which women were barred, began producing a new class of male physicians trained in the scholastic traditions of Galen and Hippocrates. Concurrently, licensing regimes emerged, criminalising the “unlicensed” practice of medicine. The work of the village healer, once a respected part of society, was systematically recast as illegitimate, even diabolical.

Canon law provided the theological framework. The concept of maleficium—harmful magic—was expansively defined to include any healing that went awry, any crop failure, any stillborn child. If a cure was successful, it was God’s will; if it failed, it was a demonic pact. This created a perfect, inescapable logic for accusation. The Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published in 1487, served as the ideological handbook for this campaign, explicitly linking witchcraft to female carnality and insubordination. It was a misogynist diatribe disguised as a legal manual, and it provided a template for inquisitors across Europe to root out a perceived conspiracy of women in league with the Devil.

Nowhere was this war over knowledge more brutally fought than when it came to midwifery. None so indicative of the transformation sweeping across Europe than the case of Walpurga Hausmännin, a licensed midwife in Dillingen, Germany. After nearly two decades of service, she was accused in 1587 of using a diabolical ointment to murder the infants she delivered. Her knowledge of salves and her central role in the reproductive process—the very source of her authority—were twisted into evidence of an evil plot.

Yet this was no an isolated incident. Midwives possessed knowledge of abortifacients and contraceptives, which threatened the Church’s doctrine of “be fruitful and multiply” and the state’s desire for a growing population. They also threatened patrilineal inheritance; a midwife’s knowledge could potentially obscure paternity or end a pregnancy. Earlier, female-authored texts like the Trotula ensemble, which documented sophisticated gynecological remedies in 12th-century Italy, were systematically suppressed or attributed to male authors. The professionalisation of medicine was, in large part, the patriarchal takeover of women’s health.

A Counter-Revolution in Blood

The peak of the witch hunts from the 15th to the 17th centuries was not a spontaneous outbreak of superstition. It coincided with a period of social and economic crisis: the Black Death had decimated the population, peasant revolts challenged feudal hierarchies, and the enclosure of common lands was pushing millions into precarious poverty.

The witch hunt directed social anxiety away from the ruling class and onto a scapegoated “internal enemy.” The old woman living on the edge of the village, surviving on her knowledge of herbs and the community’s reciprocal care, became a symbol of a dying world order that had to be violently purged.

The statistics are stark. An estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe during this period, with 75-80% of them being women. In regions like the Holy Roman Empire, the epicentre of the persecution, the numbers were catastrophic, with some territories like Eichstätt seeing women comprise 88% of those executed. This was a gendered massacre, a disciplining of female autonomy, labour, and sexuality on an industrial scale.

This European discourse of demonisation was exported as a tool of colonial conquest. The knowledge of Indigenous healers in the Americas and of African diasporic midwives was similarly branded as witchcraft, justifying brutal suppression and enabling the dismantling of communal lifeways. While a brief look at Salem is sufficient, it confirms the pattern: the accusations there intersected with gender, property disputes, and the Puritan theocracy’s need to enforce conformity, neatly transplanting European dynamics to a new shore.

Yet the knowledge was never fully erased. It survived in the hidden traditions of kitchen gardens, family “receipt” books, and secret mentorship chains. It persisted syncretically in practices like Hoodoo and Curanderismo, where African, Indigenous, and European herbal wisdom merged under the radar of oppression. Secrecy became both a shield and a testament to the resilience of this subversive knowledge.

The modern resonances are unmistakable. The 19th-century professionalisation of medicine involved the systematic criminalisation of midwifery and abortion, directly echoing the accusations levelled against Walpurga Hausmännin. Today, the fight for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights is the direct descendant of this historical struggle. The pharmaceutical industry’s appropriation of plant compounds first identified and used by traditional healers—a process often called biopiracy—is a modern-day enclosure of the commons of knowledge, profiting from the very wisdom that was once burned at the stake.

Re-politicising the Witch Today

To reclaim the witch today is to do more than adopt an aesthetic. It is to reconnect with her historical material reality as a guardian of communal care and a resistor of oppressive power. She is a symbol of mutual aid, of ecological stewardship, and of the unyielding right to control one’s own body. The current legislative battles over reproductive rights are not new; they are the latest front in a centuries-old war over who gets to decide the fate of our flesh and our futures.

The call to action, then, is to remember and rebuild. It is to support community herb gardens, to contribute to abortion funds, to resist corporate patents on traditional medicines, and to revalue the knowledge that exists outside formal institutions. The persecution of “witches” was a class war and a gender war.

By remembering their stories not as tales of superstition but as records of political repression, we honour their legacy and continue their fight—a fight for a world where the knowledge to heal and to care is once again a common treasure, not a commodity or a crime.