Witch memorials are quietly spreading across Europe
Jan Machielsen, Cardiff University and Paul Webster, Cardiff University
Across Europe, campaigns for national witch memorials are gathering pace. In the Netherlands, a charity recently announced it had selected the design for a monument in Roermond, the site of the country’s worst witch-hunt.
In Scotland, campaigners Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi published a manifesto, How To Kill A Witch, to continue pressure on the Scottish government for a state-funded monument. Their Witches of Scotland campaign had won an early victory in 2022 when first minister Nicola Sturgeon issued an official apology.
Across early modern Europe (1450-1750), between 40,000 and 50,000 people were executed as witches. Though the age and gender of the accused varied from place to place, roughly 75% to 80% of all victims were women.
Within Britain and Ireland, Scotland saw some of the fiercest witch-hunting. Historians have identified more than 3,800 accusations (84% women), leading to perhaps as many as 2,500 executions.
Despite these stark figures, there are still no official national witch memorials anywhere in Europe, although the Steilneset memorial in northern Norway, created in 2011, comes close.
The lack of such national memorials does not mean the witch hunt has been forgotten. Its memory has long offered moral lessons for the present.
On the other side of the Atlantic, descendants of those caught up in the infamous 1692 Salem witch trials were among the earliest to commemorate the victims. A cenotaph erected in 1885 by descendants of Rebecca Nurse, one of the Salem accused, may well have been the first.
In Europe, there are similar local memorials. A witches’ well installed outside Edinburgh Castle in 1894 was probably the earliest such memorial in Europe, but most local attempts at memorialisation have been much more recent.
Our project – supported by Cardiff University’s On Campus student internship scheme – mapped memorials around the world and created an inventory of 134 plaques, memorials, sites and museums, which skews heavily towards the 21st century. Of the sites that can be securely dated, nearly half were unveiled during the past decade.
#MeToo, politics and wartime bears
This growth in grassroots interest has several origins. It partly stems from renewed concern at present-day violence, both against women in general but also against suspected witches in the global south. Our research threw up one memorial in the Indian state of Odisha to deter modern vigilantism.
It also coincides with the popularisation of witch-hunting as a political metaphor and the #MeToo movement. The latter not only encouraged women to call out misogyny, in the process it also highlighted how few statues of non-royal women exist.
It was the sight of a statue of Wojtek, a Polish bear and second world war mascot in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, that inspired one of the Witches of Scotland campaigners. If a bear could be commemorated, why not any of the thousands of women executed as witches?
Overlaying witch memorials with the geography of the early modern witch-hunt reveals further striking patterns. With 29 local memorials, Scotland accounts for the largest share, followed by Germany with 24 – both epicentres of the early modern witch-hunt.
By contrast, France is virtually absent from our data. There is no memorial in the former Duchy of Lorraine, another notable witch-hunting hotspot, nor any marker in Paris of the sensational and infamous “affair of the poisons” that shook Louis XIV’s court.
Whether to remember is also a political choice. Memorials in the Basque country present witch-hunting as foreign (French and Spanish) impositions, while glossing over the role played by local officials and folkloric beliefs.
Catalonia saw relatively few trials but its nationalist politicians have spearheaded motions labelling the witch-hunt “institutionalised femicide”. In this way, calls for a memorial have become something of a vehicle for progressive nationalism.
How to remember can be fraught. Accusations of kitsch, commercialism and profit haunt museums in particular. Salem’s Witch Museum was once named the world’s second biggest tourist trap.
Perhaps for this reason, many communities have settled for straightforward plaques listing those executed for alleged witchcraft. In a similar spirit, streets in Catalonia and Scotland have been renamed in their memory as well.
Going further raises thorny questions of artistic licence and historical representation. Visual depictions risk perpetuating stereotypes about warts, noses and pointy hats.
On the other hand, portraying witches as alluring ignores a substantial body of research linking witchcraft fears to young mothers’ anxieties about the postmenopausal body. For those reasons, a monument on a Belgian roundabout of a naked witch “flying to freedom” on her broomstick surrounded by traffic sparked much debate among our project team.
Acts of remembering inevitably entail acts of forgetting, and there are pitfalls here to be avoided. Stronger, more centralised states saw less witch-hunting, not more. State and church-issued pardons and apologies may thus downplay the role that communities played in witch persecutions, including other women.
Remembering is never simple. Yet, as one of history’s most infamous forms of demonisation, the early modern witch-hunt will always teach us how easy it is to blame, and how difficult it is to understand.
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Jan Machielsen, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University and Paul Webster, Lecturer in Medieval History and Co-Ordinator, Exploring the Past Pathway, Cardiff University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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