Kelsey Widner’s Reviews > How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women > Status Update

“Either the Devil is real, and he was operating in West Fife from the seventeenth century. . . Or we have an institution. . . which basically has a preconceived idea and is forcing it on those that it considered guilty.”

“The horror of the situation these poor women would have been in. . . Stripped, shaved, and searched by men. . . In custody in dire conditions, not knowing when her incarceration would end. . . Kept awake day and night, questioned about when she met the Devil”

“None are more prominent than the unmitigated rigor with which the profession as well as the practice of Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Necromancy, were punished. . . Whose lives were sacrificed to satisfy the gloomy superstitions of Nations. . . Only emerging from a state of semi-barbarism”

“during the American Civil War, the Confederates attacked the Unionists in propagandist pamphlets, saying the North should get off their moral high horses about slavery because they were no better: they had burned women at the stake. Although women were rarely killed in this manner (strangulation was by far the most common method of execution), this accusation stuck, becoming the basis for the popular trope”

“The trials in Europe, particularly in Scotland, were larger, more widespread, and bloodier, with much higher death tolls.”
- Speaking on how the Salem Witch Trials are more widely known than other witch trials of history even though they were not the worst of them all.

“Tituba’s involvement in the witch trials is interesting for several reasons. . . was the only accused woman who wasn’t white. And third, despite her extraordinary confession, when she finally went to trial fifteen months later, Tituba was not found guilty.”

“But others [witch prickers] were driven by money and power and still others by sexual appetite or even sadism. Some will no doubt have been driven by a combination of all factors. Money was certainly a corrupting influence. Because prickers were paid by the head, there was nothing to discourage the unscrupulous from deliberately inflating the numbers of those found guilty.”

“More often than not, the witches’ confessions led directly to their executions. The obvious question is how were these incriminating confessions extracted? Enter the witch pricker.”

“Women were accused of the following witchcraft between 1661 and 1662 in Forfar: being beautiful; digging up a dead baby to eat in a pie to give themselves special, demonic powers. . . This list is by no means exhaustive.”

“There’s an incredibly unusual aspect to Girzell’s case: she was buried after her execution. This may not seem unusual, but most convicted witches’ remains were burned and destroyed rather than being buried.”