Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland

Julian Goodare’s article, Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland, is an article written in response to a book written by Christina Larner.  According to Goodare, Larner’s book, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland, pioneered modern scholarly works of witch-hunts.[1] Goodare gives a lot of credit to Larner and writes about how she covered every possible question about the witch-hunts that could be asked. He stated however, that Larner only focused on the demonic pact of witch craft because she felt that women were not singled out as witches because men were also accused.[2]  These points of Larner’s work lead Goodare to write this article asking two questions. The first question being, why were witches women?  According to Goodare, the answer to why witches were women, explains the witch hunt.[3]  The second, what effect did the witch-hunts have on women in Scottish society?  He also stated, the answer to this question will explain its significance for early modern Scotland.[4]  Goodare organized this article by stating perceptional facts from people of the witch-hunt era and actual accounts of witches hunted along with his scholarly findings. 

His introduction gives a basic background of previous scholarly work and the thoughts of historians of the early years.  He compares his own beliefs without discrediting previous discoveries. With Larner not believing that women were targeting during witch-hunts, he stated that there were already feminist calling the witch-hunts a “hypocritical plot by men,” so Larner had taken another approach.[5] A debate, now, has been opened between Larner and Goodare and the article goes to not disprove Larner, but to give authentification to Goodare.

Goodare’s first section gave us a brief introduction to the history of the witch-hunts and introduced the readers to the key players of the plot.  With witch-hunting lasting from 1550 to 1700, 85% of the supposed thousand people executed were women.  These women were predominately poor and sometimes widowed, while their hunters were usually upper class men that in some form had some control of the local government. These men included sheriffs and peace officers, but most were part of a group called the Kirk Sessions. The Kirk sessions were the church’s parish committees.  He also states that during this time, Scotland went through a series of crisis in which women’s role in society seemingly became that of a “scapegoat” for the problems they were encountering. [6]