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Of Witches and Wise Women
How early modern Europe expelled women from the medical profession and targeted unmarried women
In 1597, Grissell Gairdner of Newburgh in the Scottish region of Fife was arrested and accused of witchcraft. James VI was king of Scotland, and he had already acquired a reputation as a prosecutor of witches. Eventually, Gairdner’s husband intervened to save his wife, and she was released.
Thirteen years later, after her husband died and she became a widow, Gairdner was arrested again and accused of “sorcerie and witchcraft,” making people and animals ill, and consulting with the devil. Since Gairdner had already been arrested, she was suspected to be, in the words of a chronicler of the time, a “wicked woman and a sorcerer.”
The only recognized punishment for such crimes was death. By this point, Gairdner was sixty. She lived alone and had no one to intervene on her behalf. The trial was temporarily delayed because, as the chronicler writes, “there was no precedent found qualified against her.” A verdict was finally reached on 7 September 1610, when Gairdner was strangled and burned to death on Edinburgh’s Castle Hill.
The difference between the treatment Gairdner received as a married woman and her strangulation as a single woman thirteen years later fits into a…
