The years 1550-1650 have been described by some as the century of the “Witch craze” in Europe. The entire period of the “Witch Hunt” in Europe is, however, taken to cover three centuries from the 14th to the 17th century. The devastation of the Black Death had been between 1347 to 1349. Rumor-panics that some forces were attempting to use magic to destroy Christendom had begun spreading even before the Black Death began. But soon after the Black Death, the surge of rumors was renewed, and soon became centered primarily on a new obsession: witches.

The first major trial of Witches Apothecary Cabinet is said to have occurred in the 15th century, but the scale of the witch-hunt dropped somewhat during the first years of the 16th century due, as believed by some, to the initial effect of the Reformations which diverted the attention of the Catholic Church to other more pressing problems. Then, beginning from about 1550, history records a massive surge in the “witch craze.”

The onset of the witch-hunts has been attributed, by many sociologists, to social stress, especially among the lower socio-economic classes, against a backdrop of rapid social, economic and religious transformation. The pattern of mass hysteria witnessed at the onset of the witchhunts, in connection with epidemics and other natural disasters, is similar to the mass hysteria which has been observed and studied, in modern day societies, among the lower socio-economic classes.

A notable feature of the witch-hunts is that majority of the victims were women(estimated as having been as high as eighty percent). It has been correctly observed that never before, nor after, in all human history, was a particular gender specifically targeted for persecution on the scale that was witnessed as in the Witch-hunts of medieval Europe. Estimates of how many people were killed during the Witch-hunt varies, but it is generally believed that earlier estimates were flagrantly overblown. A more conservative estimate is between 40 000 to 50 000 people between the years 1450 to 1750.

The typical “witch” was a woman, an elderly woman, very often a woman living alone as a widow, or one who had never had children. Global statistics show that women generally live longer than men and in the circumstances of social life tend to survive more often than men into old age. Living alone, beyond the direct scrutiny of her privacy by her neighbours, in circumstances of isolation which were not necessarily the choice of the elderly female, tended to arouse suspicion in her neighbors about the particulars of her private activities. The final irony of the Witch-hunts, particularly from the perspective of modern day feminists, is that many accusations of witchcraft leading to trial and execution were brought up by women against fellow women. Interpersonal conflicts between women, in a neighborhood, often ended up in someone accusing the other of witchcraft. Estimates show that women were often more than 50% of persons bringing accusations of witchcraft against another woman whom, usually, they had had a quarrel with and had somehow become convinced of being under the bewitching influence of that person.

The conviction rate was very high, indeed, mostly because anyone brought before the authorities on accusation of witchcraft was usually subjected to brutal torture. It is believed that most of those who confessed to being witches did so because of the unbearable torture that they were subjected to. Most cases were tried in secular courts, and execution was usually by public hanging or burning. Luckier individuals got away with imprisonment and other non-capital punishments.

The tendency of society to target women on accusations of witchcraft is not unique to the Europeans caught in the craze of the European witch-hunts. It appears to be a universal phenomenon. There appears to be a common psycho-social complex of reasons why women tend to have unlimited supernatural powers to implement malicious intent ascribed to them, especially in their old-age. And it would appear that this pyshco-social phenomenon is centered, not only on a common paranoid complex in human beings which tends to personalize evil and misfortune and embody it in the nearest vulnerable individual, but also on the distrust that men have towards women in their self-experience of vulnerability to the potency of sexual attraction that women wield over men. The convergence of this malignant fear of women by men, on older women, can be explained by the fact that while a younger attractive woman would usually have a committed male protector in her father or husband, older women living alone are very vulnerable since they, at best, represent economic burden even to those who might be responsible to them.