

That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.Įven those who have studied the witch hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the sixteenth-century demonologists. To this day, it remains one the most understudied phenomena in European history, or rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations. The witch hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat.

Excerpted from Caliban and the Witch (2004, Autonomedia).
