The Emotions of Witches

This paper studies not the deeds but the feelings attributed to witches both by
artists and by their interrogators.  During the late Middle Ages and the early
modern period, men regarded women as the vessels of emotion--who, because they
were easily carried away, could not be relied upon to consider any situation
rationally.  Good women could put this characteristic to the service of
devotion, as in weeping like Mary over the Passion, or in loving their husbands
and children.  Bad women, however, were bound together by the trait of
inappropriate feeling:  love of the devil, hatred of mothers and infants, a
lack of compassion for their neighbors, inappropriate sexual desires as
expressed at sabbaths.  Their prosecutors studied their faces intently,
including during the course of torture, to see whether they were weeping, and
if so if they shed tears.  If not, this tearlessness provided additional
evidence of their apostate nature.