In an era in which the neologism “femicide” has sadly entered the current language, it is worth remembering that mass femicide that was the so-called witch hunt. The Notepad of Michael the Great
In an era in which the neologism “femicide” has sadly entered the current language, it is worth remembering that mass femicide that was the so-called witch hunt, a frightening tragedy that devastated the European continent between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Nobody was able to calculate how many victims of the massacre were. Many records and minutes have been lost, often voluntarily destroyed by inquisitors and judges as the French Revolution swept away the obscurantism of the Old Regime. The fact is that tens of thousands of women, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were jailed, martyred and killed with grotesque charges.
As Valerio Evangelisti wrote, numerous scholars have tried to investigate the reasons for this bloody madness (introduction to Female witch by Mario Boffo, Stampa Alternativa, 2017). But a single answer has not yet been given. The contempt for women, inherited from Judaism and injected into Christianity by the fathers of the Church, from Tertullian to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas certainly weighs heavily. In a still fragile ecclesiastical building, the fears of the reappearance, behind the proliferation of heresies, of a never completely eradicated paganism also counted.
These factors, combined with the need to exercise political and social control over the faithful, favored a colossal propaganda action against witches, accused of practicing black magic and the art of curse, of being an instrument of Satan and the cause of famines and epidemics that afflicted cities and villages. In 1468, when Paul II established that witchcraft was crimen exceptum (“special crime”), the task of eradicating it ceased to be the prerogative of the Inquisition and was extended to civil courts, where there was no prohibition on the shedding of blood imposed on religious ones. .
It was then that in various countries of the Old Continent the most disparate and cruel devices of torture were invented, sometimes expressly modeled on the physiology of the female body. While the absurd and indemonstrable accusations remained entrusted to manuals such as the Malleus Maleficarum (“The hammer of evil”) by the Dominican friar Heirich Kramer (1487) or to treatises on demonolatry such as that of the Catholic jurist Nicolas Remy (1595).
The fiction of the fantastic genre about witchcraft is endless, and even the cinema has contributed to spreading questionable stereotypes of the phenomenon. Other texts, on the other hand, provide a description based on solid documentary foundations. Apart from the essays by Jules Michelet (The witch, 1862) and Aldous Huxley (The devils of Loudun, 1952), three novels with great historical reliability and stylistic dignity have been published in more recent times in Italy: Sebastiano Vassalli (1990); Strega, by Remo Guerrini (1991); and, in fact, the aforementioned book by Boffo, published for the first time in 2004.
Set in different provinces (Novara, Imperia and Benevento), all three tell the stories of young women who have fallen into the perverse gear of suspicion and denunciation; up to a tragic fate in Vassalli, and a paradoxically benign one in the other two authors. But above all Boffo to identify in no uncertain terms the nerve center of the persecution of the “malefics” in the repression of femininity, and to support it – in the footsteps of Michelet – in a dense afterword to his novel. In his work, the witch hunt appears as a warning, an exemplary punishment to women who dare to disobey the rules of a rigidly hierarchical society, such as Formicarius (1437), the anthill of the prior of the Nuremberg convent Johann Nider.
The almost daily chronicles of violence against women remind us that, despite the undeniable progress made in the field of gender equality, in fact, even today the “witch” (the woman) is persecuted when she tries to cross the boundaries of the traditional family triad. , motherhood, couple. Alongside brutal oppressions such as murder, burns, acid, the technological Middle Ages in which we live has sparked new forms of burning: the spread via the web of insults, comments and judgments that unload on women the responsibility for harassment or of a rape suffered. Not fortuitously, a freshly printed survey by Istat certified that, for a quarter of Italians, for one reason or another, “they looked for it”.
The path, therefore, is still long before the other half of heaven finds its rightful place in society. But the writer is convinced that sooner or later this will happen. And “only then will the masculine and feminine principles of the universe reach a serene balance in the broadest sense of the human condition” (Boffo).
