The Misogyny of Witchcraft

A noble science?

Most of the treatises on witchcraft published in the 16th century took legalistic or theological approaches. But with the growing professionalization of medicine in Western Europe, much of which was indebted to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, new theories developed about witches and witchcraft that derived from new ideas in medicine.

Agrippa and Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, commonly called Paracelsus, were two of the Renaissance’s most influential writers. Both believed that witchcraft was a noble science, and therefore their views on magic were in direct contradiction to contemporary Church doctrine that identified witchcraft as heresy. For Agrippa, magic was a sublime and sacred science, and for Paracelsus, it had been created by God but misused by demons.

Both Agrippa and Paracelsus developed complicated, and contradictory, ideas about women, especially in the context of contemporary theories of witchcraft. Both men praised women, but both also believed in the relative inferiority of women. Both men believed in witchcraft, and both also tended to identify women as witches.
 

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