Rolands

Ok, so I am pretty sure I have been doing this whole blogging thing wrong because I’ve just been putting up my outlines from what I’ve been reading but after looking at other peoples blogs I’ve decided I should probably attempt to liven things up a bit and actually add some commentary. 

Rolands main focus for his research was Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany and the trial of Appolonia Glaitter.  I liked that he really stuck to these two specifics because although the Roper book is extremely informative its often hard for me to figure out where or who he is talking about because there are so many different places and people included. 

Appolonia Glaitter was 56 years old, was married four times, and was from the countryside around Rothenburg.  Her neighbors the Klenckhsin accused her of witchcraft July 1671.  The reason that this family accused Appolonia of witchcraft was because she supposedly had caused their daughter’s foot to swell up with pus when she had kindly offered them plants from her yard.  This is the hardest thing for me to understand about witchcraft.  How neighbors and family members could say that someone they know so closely is a witch, especially when what they are doing is actually kind, and when they know that such an accusation could lead to that persons imprisonment, execution and torture. 

While Roper talked about why older women were disproportionately represented, Rolands gives slightly different reasons for why these elderly women were so often seen as witches.  When I think of witch today, unless I am thinking about TV shows in which witches are all young, beautiful, and use their powers for good, I usually think of the old, bent, evil witches from Disney movies.  And this apparently is not a new thing.  It must have been easier for someone to think an old, wrinkled, and possibly bitter woman was more capable of the malevolence required to be a witch then young fertile women.  Rolands makes this point, saying that the sagging breasts and shriveled stomach that Roper claimed were the markers of an infertile woman were not really what people would have most often associated with old women.  Instead, he says that it is the hunched over, wrinkled, toothless woman, which closely resembles modern stereotype, would have been the one to be considered infertile and elderly, and therefore have a greater possibility of being accused of witchcraft. 

However, Rolands goes on to say that it was not even truly the appearance of the women that mattered in these witch trails, but their actions.  I think it was terrible how after a woman was accused of witchcraft everyone that knew her then poured over all their memories of her in an attempt to find evidence of witchcraft, even when the woman had often only been helpful or kind to them.

I was quite shocked when I learned that a majority of women accused of witchcraft were married or widowed.  I always had this picture that witches were spinsters who lacked family and were therefore alone in the world.   Rolands says that widows were particularly susceptible to accusations of witchcraft because they had lost the protection of their husband and often these widows had been thought to be witches for years.  The belief that a woman was a witch could also increase with her age if her poverty decreased and she became more dependent on others for assistance.  So, Rolands says that often times poor women were those accused of witchcraft, but this could have been because they had already been suspected of being witches, so their pleas for assistance only fueled an already lit fire.