This episode is about witch hunts, but not the Halloween kind. We’re talking about how early modern Europe went from relying on women healers and midwives for everything to torturing and killing them as witches, and how that panic helped clear the way for male-dominated, professional medicine.
I walk through how climate crisis, war, plague, and sky-high infant mortality created a pressure cooker where someone had to be blamed, and the woman who literally had her hands on the body, your midwife, became the obvious target. Then we zoom out with Silvia Federici, Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Lyndal Roper, and others to look at the bigger picture: witch hunts as a way to break women’s communal power over healing and reproduction so their bodies and labor could be folded into a new patriarchal, capitalist order.
And just to be crystal clear: this is a critique of the history of medicine, not an argument against modern medical or prenatal care. Birth has always been dangerous; today’s doctors, midwives, and nurses save lives every day. The point isn’t “reject medicine,” it’s “understand how misogyny got baked into the system so we can demand better.”
Recommended Reading
Primary Historical Works
Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear
A sweeping global analysis of witch beliefs and why societies became terrified of women’s power.
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany
Essential for understanding the psychology of witchcraft accusations and gendered fear.
Owen Davies, The Oxford History of Witchcraft and Magic
Excellent overview of European witch beliefs and cultural shifts.
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages
Great for primary source material and early Church anxieties about women healers.
Feminist Analyses
Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses
Classic feminist history on how women healers were pushed out of medicine.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
A groundbreaking argument connecting witch hunts to capitalism and reproductive control.
Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women
Short, sharp essays connecting early modern persecutions to contemporary gendered violence.
