Women comprised roughly eighty-three percent of roughly 100,000 Europeans tried for witchcraft

Evidence

Women comprised the bulk of witchcraft prosecutions: Jean Bodin in 1580 set the ratio at fifty women to one man; James I in his Daemonologie (1597) placed it at twenty to one; Alexander Roberts (1616) believed it to be one hundred to one. A calculation of English Home Circuit Court executions showed that 102 out of 109 persons put to death were women. In 1585, two villages in the Bishopric of Trier in Germany were each left with only one female inhabitant. Combined modern statistics for several European countries indicate that of the total tried (some 100,000), women comprised approximately eighty-three percent. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 572

Categorization

• CANDY: The Trier detail — two villages each left with a single surviving female — is a striking, tweetable image of demographic devastation.