I've been summoned by @artielu to vet this post, and I'm happy to confirm that it is, in fact, fairly accurate and does represent many of the ways in which medieval people did (and did not) think about gender, witchcraft, religion, magic, and practice. I've written quite a bit on this topic before, probably back when I was teaching a class on magic and the supernatural in the Middle Ages, but it's been a while.
The boring stereotypical Bad Middle Ages take is that medieval people were all howling misogynists and thus were burning Female Witches (and also midwives, out of an idea that medieval people saw all female-led intellectual practice as inherently bad, which is also uh, questionable) at the stake left and right. As I have carped about many times, Witch Trials (TM) as most people think of them were decidedly an early modern invention. The idea of witchcraft as both a) real and b) specifically and evilly female was also in fact a very late medieval invention; it was most explicitly codified in the infamous Malleus maleficarum of 1485. However its author, Heinrich Kramer, was already a raging misogynist and had been chased out of his parish the year before when for some reason, people got tired of him randomly accusing their wives and daughters of witchcraft. The Malleus is well known as a "witch hunting handbook," but people then tend to generalize its late 15th-century conclusions, written by one tiresome misogynist, as completely representative of The Middle Ages Everywhere. The Malleus also contains some anti-sodomitic polemicals, so there are just a whole stew of gender, queer, and other anxieties being represented here in a late medieval context. See i.e.:
- Bailey, M. D., ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 960-90.
- Bailey, M.D., ‘The feminization of magic and the emerging idea of the female witch in the late Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 120-134
- Broedel, H.P., 'To preserve the manly form from so vile a crime: ecclesiastical anti-sodomitic rhetoric and the gendering of witchcraft in the Malleus Maleficarum', Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 136-148
- Broedel, H.P., The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
- Harley, D. ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 1-26
- Katajala-Peltomaa, S. ‘A good wife? Demonic Possession and Discourses of Gender in Late Medieval Culture’, in Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M.G. Muravyeva and R.M. Tovio (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 73-88
- Stephens, W., ‘Witches who steal penises: impotence and illusion in the Malleus Maleficarum’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), 495-529
It's true that some of the most dedicated practitioners of ritual magic, and scholars and conservationists of magical texts, were monks, churchmen, and other religious figures. Some of them started from the position that God possessed the only supernatural power and any claim of other magic was wrong, but many others did believe that magical power was accessible from a variety of sources, even as this interacted uneasily with related notions of heresy, religion, blasphemy, and (demonic) sin. This represented the complex and shifting interaction between institutional Catholic and traditional/folk magic beliefs, which were never fully assimilated or "erased." It was in fact also popular among laypeople, as magical amulets or charms were highly valued for their supposedly protective capacities. Magic and ritual magic was also widely used in medicine and yes, for sex (people have always been people etc. etc.). See i.e.:
- Bailey, M. D., Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2003)
- Boureau, A., Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2006)
- Collins, D., ed., Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West (New York, NY and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
- Fanger, C., ed. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud: Sutton, 1998)
- Flint, V. I. J., The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
- Kieckhefer, R., Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
- Kieckhefer, R. ‘Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe’, in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. Salisbury (London and New York, NY: Garland, 1991), 30-55
- Olsan, L.T., ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 343-66
- Page, S. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2013)
- Rider, C. ‘Danger, stupidity and infidelity: magic and discipline in John Bromyard’s Summa for Preachers’, Studies in Church History, 43 (2007), 191-20
I could go on with quite a bit more, but the point is: there is an extensive scholarly literature on this topic, and any depiction of magical and supernatural beliefs in the Middle Ages, especially in popular media, is often the laziest imaginable shorthand for "they all hated women, thought they were witches, and burned anyone who didn't believe in the all-powerful Catholic church." Yet again, this also does vary by time period, as The Middle Ages are not one single undifferentiated block. A twelfth-century author is far more likely to scoff at the credulous fools who think magic is real or can actually compare to the power of God, whereas the early-modern authors, influenced by Kramer, will do far more of the stereotypical "witchcraft is a particularly female-gendered thing and also real, satanic, and evil." And yes, many medieval magic practitioners and enthusiasts were a) monks and the church and b) regular people, because it occupied a complex place in their belief system and was by no means simply evil. This doesn't mean that they were "more" or "less" enlightened according to the also-wildly-erroneous Scale of Perceived Human Progress, but just that they were complicated, stereotypes are stupid, and my kingdom for one (1) single nuanced, thoughtful, or remotely accurate depiction of this in medieval-themed media. The end.
