Malleus Maleficarum: The Great Witch Hunt as a Serial-Killing Woman Hunt
Historians are still baffled by the orgy of executions for witchcraft in Renaissance-era Europe, with its peak coming roughly between 1450 and 1650, a period known as the Great Witch Hunt or the Great Hunt. The witch hunt was a woman-hunting industry, institutionalized in a partnership between the Church and the state with the collaboration of a motley crew of lay subcontractors, demonologists, academics, pundits, self-appointed witch-hunters, torture “experts,” notaries, dungeon keepers, and so on. And these women were not just killed; they were first degraded, horrifically tortured and mutilated, and frequently raped. It was state-and Church-licensed sadistic serial lust murder. There is no other appropriate way of describing it. This really was a serial-killing gynocide, as many feminist historians have termed it.
(Below) Historical images and contemporary illustrations attest to the pathologically sexual brutality directed by lay contract torturers at the breasts and genitals of females accused of witchcraft under the supervision of the clergy. The priests and monks took notes and created various transgressive sexual fantasy scripts to which the women were tortured to confess to, like having intercourse with the Devil. Obscene gynecological instruments of torture—heated iron tongs, expandable probes, scrapers, crushers, claws, pins and needles—were designed by pathologically crazed witch-hunters obsessed with the “evils” of female genitalia.
(Below) The Pear of Anguish was a dildo-like probe with a gear mechanism that allowed for it to be cranked open after being inserted into a victim's mouth, anal or genital cavities. The iron device was sometimes heated red-hot over coals prior to insertion.
(Below) Specially designed "breast rippers"
