They dragged them from their homes and from the fields, tens of thousands of them.

Mostly women. They were the ones who bore the brunt of it.

They were accused, tortured, hanged, drowned and burned.

Europe, in the 16th and 17th centuries, was gripped by an insidious panic, one that infiltrated towns and communities,

one that was preached from the pulpits and argued in the pages of books.

For over 300 years, there was a plague of wild accusations of witchcraft.

The women who communities had once relied on to heal, to deliver their children,

to raise the next generation, suddenly found themselves the targets of malicious village gossips,

or witch hunters.

The likes of Matthew Hopkins, who terrorised the women of Essex in England in the

1650s, and Heinrich Kramer, who wrote the infamous witch-hunting manual, the Malias Malifakarum,

the man who harnessed this new media to supercharge witch-hunting.

In 1485, Kramer had been humiliated by an outspoken woman, by the name of

Helena Schoiberin, who he tried to accuse of witchcraft but was found innocent in court. The judge

dismissed the case, calling Kramer senile and unfit to generate any further trials. In response,

he wrote, the Malleus Malifacarum, the most

dangerous book of the 16th century, and that's up against some pretty stiff competition.

Now, once you dig into stories of quote-unquote witches like Helena Schoiberin, it becomes

reasonably clear to us that these accusations were rarely about their magical abilities,

more about control, about fear, about social anxiety and tension.

This was a period of great upheaval in Europe.

It was a time of war, which again doesn't particularly mark it out, but it was.

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