Name: 歴史家だけど「魔術・魔女」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-22T08:50:06.000Z
Duration: 39 min 19 s
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I'm historian Mikki Brach, let's answer your questions from the internet.

At LeilaLikesMusic, can men be witches or is it hashtag just for the girls?

Anywhere between 75 and 80 percent of those accused of witchcraft were women.

There were a few places where the majority of people accused of witchcraft were men.

But these were also places where the witch trial never boiled into a full-blown panic.

A lot of the men who are accused of witchcraft are accused in moments where they are related to or in proximity to a woman who is accused of witchcraft.

So their mother might have been accused, their sister, their aunt, their wife even.

That could bring them in the minds of authorities closer to the crime and could make them vulnerable to that allegation.

There were also some men who ran afoul of traditional norms of masculinity.

They might have used their power in a way that was deemed irrational.

Men were supposed to be rational, the opposite of women who were irrational and emotional.

These sorts of deviations from the norms of masculinity could make potentially someone more vulnerable.

You may remember the case of Giles Corey.

Giles Corey was made famous by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.

And he is the man in that story and in the actual history who was pressed to death after he was accused of witchcraft.

That is to say a slab of wood was laid on top of them and then rock was placed and rock was placed and rock was placed until he was pressed to death into the earth.

He had been accused of witchcraft after his wife, Martha Corey, had been accused.

And the reason he was pressed to death like this is because he refused to enter a plea.

And in English law, you had to enter a plea.

And of course, very famously, and this may be apocryphal, we don't know for sure if he said this, but Arthur Miller said he did, Giles Corey's last words were defiantly, more weight.

Our next question is from Adam Mikkelveen.

What better way is there to spend a Thursday morning than learning about methods of torture used on accused witches in Scotland?

I too enjoy thinking about torture methods.

We're talking about 90,000 people accused and about 50% of them executed.

And torture was really key in order to get people convicted for witchcraft.

And that's because when you think about witchcraft, it's a crime that's kind of unseen.

If you don't have eyewitnesses to the crime, then what you need is a confession.

You need an individual to confess to meeting with the devil under the cover of night, using harmful magic to kill babies and harm crops and render men impotent.

So the question might be, what sorts of torture methods did they use?

If you're interested in Scotland, they really enjoyed the thumb screws, these little screws that tighten and tighten and tighten on your thumb.

In some places, they were a little bit less gruesome, like the use of sleep deprivation, which was common in England in the 1640s.

Other places more gruesome still, like the rack, a medieval torture device that was used into the early modern period that could either stretch or compress limbs, the strapato, which is used to tie arms behind one's back and hoist you up over a pulley, sometimes with weights attached to your legs, so that your shoulders become dislocated.

And of course, we know torture gives us terrible information.

But it was useful for authorities who felt that witchcraft was such an exceptional crime.

They would use torture in ways they typically wouldn't.

People were allowed to flout the typical legal norms and practices.

And what that meant is you could get people to confess to all sorts of fantastical things.

Next question is from AskHistorians, great website on Reddit.

I feel like you're a Monty Python character.

How did the Salem witch trials become the face of the historical witch hunts when European witch trials took place much earlier and were more numerous?

The dominance, kind of the cultural imperialism of America has really brought the witch trials, Salem witch trials to front of mind.

And of course, Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which was performed on both sides of the Atlantic, is going to be part of that.

It happens in this Puritan colony that's often held up as this great example of the American experiment.

And I think because it's so late, people think surely this is a time period when they have stopped hunting witches by the end of the 17th century, right?

The 17th century is the heyday of the scientific revolution.

We're talking about, you know, Galileo and Isaac Newton and all of these things.

So people see Salem as sort of a shock to the system, whereas potentially a 16th century witch trial seems more understandable.

But I also want to say that this idea that the witch hunts happened in the Middle Ages, they didn't.

If you ever hear someone say witch hunting was a medieval phenomenon, it was not.

The bulk of the witch hunts happened in the early modern period, that is to say the 16th and 17th century.

Cora asks, were witches ever burned at the stake in the USA like they were in Britain?

Actually, I'm going to go with no and no.

They were hung in New England and in the colonies, and they were also hung in England.

English common law treated witchcraft as a crime of sort of treason, an act against the state, an act against the church, and it wasn't treated as a heresy.

They were just hung in England and the English colonies.

In Scotland, they were strangled and then burned, and then in many places in continental Europe, they were straight up burned.

So a nice range of execution methods we have there.

Why were the witch tests so deadly and dumb?

Almost all the tests required the person to die, even if there was no proof that they were or not.

These are variations on what people called in earlier periods the trial by ordeal.

The idea that you could do a certain test.

The most famous one that we tend to think of is the swim test, the dunking of witches, the throwing the women into water, and seeing if they floated or not.

People really thought divine providence was critical.

So there was a lot of confidence that God would not let an innocent person die, and that belief was really strong.

Now let me say actually the swim test, the throw her into a pond, as they do in Monty Python.

There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.

That isn't actually used as often as we're led to think by its prominence in popular culture, but it did happen, and it is an example again of that belief that humans were not alone in the world, and there were a lot of other forces that governed the application of justice and the rooting out of evildoers.

Another excellent question from Reddit's History Forum, asked by SixHorrigoth.

How is it that there were witch trials happening in different parts of the world around the same time?

You have the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, or at least the use of it and development of it in Europe, and that leads to the printing of these demonological texts that are being spread around.

So the printing press allows stories of, say, witches in Scandinavia to be printed and read about in London or in Boston, and that's going to help create this sort of consistency in the Western notion of the witch.

Do witches really cast spells, or are their abilities limited to potions and stuff?

Well, people believed that witches had a wide range of powers.

They believed witches certainly could use potions, double-double, toil and trouble, right, Shakespeare's famous line.

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歴史家だけど「魔術・魔女」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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