Witch Trials as Property Law: A New History of Terrifying Women

By 1604, an English woman could be executed for witchcraft without hard evidence that she had harmed anyone or damaged property. Eleanor Johnson's new book, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton University Press, 2026), argues that this legal threshold marks something larger: the conversion of witch persecution into a mechanism for regulating women, their sexuality and their reproduction across generations.

Johnson's case rests on dates and geography. The Carolina, an imperial code, made witchcraft a capital crime in 1532. Scotland, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland followed around 1550. England made its law slightly later, tightening it by 1604 to remove the evidentiary requirement of actual harm.

What does the pattern of persecution show?

The sharpest claim in the book is structural, not anecdotal. In sixteenth-century England, Johnson writes, areas with a high degree of enclosed land — land privatized by a wealthy holder — show a high degree of witch persecution. Areas without privatization show almost none. The explanation, following Silvia Federici, whom Johnson cites, is inheritance: exclusive claims to land demand certain knowledge of descent. "To control the land, you have to control the women — or, more precisely, you have to control their uteruses," she writes.

The account of the trials themselves is harder to read. Johnson documents that accused women were routinely stripped and shaved, pierced with needles, or made to sit on iron chairs positioned over fires. Inquisitors, she reports, often raped the accused to determine virginity — a test that destroyed the very evidence it claimed to seek. The tortures were, in her framing, explicitly or implicitly sexual, because "witches' sexuality was the thing most to be feared about them, the thing most urgently to be tested, chastened, and destroyed."

Executions were public, and designed to be. Daughters of burned witches were sometimes made to stand near the pyre while locals whipped them and their mothers died. Johnson extends the count of victims to these children: assuming many executed women had at least one daughter, she estimates hundreds of thousands of girls were forced to witness and then psychologically accommodate their mothers' deaths — often, she argues, by concluding the execution was deserved.

Who built the theory, and who doubted it?

Johnson names the architects. William Perkins, an influential English writer of the late sixteenth century, held that any power a witch appeared to have was merely borrowed from Satan. Jean Bodin's 1580 treatise The Demon-Mania of Witches defined the witch as "someone who knowingly tries to accomplish something by diabolical means" and accused witches of murdering their own children before baptism, and other women's children, whose blood they drank.

Johnson notes the contradiction inside this theory: the witch is presented as monstrously dangerous yet possessing no intrinsic power of her own. Earlier female figures of terror — Tiamat, Lamashtu, Lamia, Medea, the Furies, the Bacchae — held their power autonomously. The witch, in the sixteenth-century account, is only a vessel for Satan's will. That duality, Johnson suggests, is what made mass killing intellectually convenient.

Dissent existed. Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) denied that witches exist and called contracts with the devil a complete fiction. Scot dismissed the Malleus Maleficarum as "fables" and Bodin's treatise as "Bodin's bables," and argued that prosecutors themselves were corrupt, preying chiefly on "manie poore, olde, olde women" — in Johnson's quotation, "manie poore, olde women" — and on the elderly, depressive and superstitious.

What does the counter-argument prove?

Not much, in Johnson's account of its afterlife. Scot's book was popular and read by William Shakespeare before he wrote Macbeth in 1606. Yet the play takes witchcraft as given. Shakespeare, Johnson writes, produced "a play that takes as given that witches could exist and that, if they did, they would prey on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of those around them." The most widely circulated witch text of the seventeenth century, in other words, absorbed the skeptic's library and kept the demonology.

There are caveats the book leaves open. Johnson's figure of "hundreds of thousands" of tried, tortured and executed women is stated as a range of likelihood, not a tally. Her count of traumatized daughters rests on two assumptions she flags herself — that most executed witches were of reproductive age or older, and that many had daughters — rather than on records. The correlation between enclosure and persecution is presented as a pattern across English regions, not a demonstrated causal chain.

Even so, the geography argument is the one historians of the period will have to answer. If witch fever tracks the map of privatized land, then the trials were not an outbreak of superstition but an instrument of property — and Johnson's next subject, drama, becomes the record of how that instrument was sold to the public.