The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic" shows how in medieval Europe, society believed that practitioners of magic were wizards, usually depicted as priests or scholars, who could summon angels or demons and bend them to their will. Their powers were seen by society as dangerous and mysterious, and although they were often villainous, they were not always intrinsically evil.
By the 14th century, when the witch hunts began, there had already been a paradigm shift in how society viewed magical practitioners. Now the practitioners of magic are mainly women (either very young and beautiful or old and ugly) who make pacts with the devil. Alchemical symbols and astrology have been replaced by kitchen implements such as the cauldron and disgusting ingredients. Witches are considered a real threat to Christianity and society, justifying torture and execution. Practitioners of magic are seen by society, or at least by the authorities, as always harmful and deserving of extermination.
My question is, how and why did this paradigm shift occur concerning magic practitioners within the same Christian culture?
We can identify literature on witches as early as the 11th century when both the practices that can be magic and the “nature of women” come to be understood in especially harmful and connected ways.
First, the Church becomes much more combative with non-Christian practices, if magic could previously have had some level of neutrality or be perceived as harmless. From the ecclesiastical offensive against paganism and the heretical movements on, magic was perceived as pure satanic work. The fact that magic was seen as the work of the Devil takes us to the second point: the transformation of women into the preferred Agents of Satan.
The perception of women as inferior is long-standing in Christianity, as early as Paul the Apostle preaching female submission. Or with Augustine of Hippo elaborating that, because the female body is not the image of God, it was more mundane, which hindered the use of reason by women. Thus, the female body was full of stigmas, mainly due to menstruation and pregnancy. Although the female body is stigmatized and the submission of Christian women is the rule, it is still not an explanation for the establishment of witches.
It was a complex cultural shift but one of its main roots is in monastic literature and in the preaching of members of mendicant orders (the work of Alvaro Pelayo is paradigmatic). Celibacy and the exclusion of women from the majority of the ecclesiastical body end up alienating them from the holy and sacred. Thus, increasingly distanced from holiness, women are associated with the Devil. So all those stigmas, related to pregnancy, infant mortality, vanity, etc. become attached to Evil.
Therefore, we can point out that with the emergence of a new misogynist movement within the ecclesiastical body, women were directly linked to the occult and diabolical. This connection was summarized as Witchcraft.