This chapter lays out the analytical framework that has helped us understand witch hunts. In particular, we elaborate on the concept of articulation and the way we have used and demonstrated it in this book.

We have used three variables to explain witch hunts: a culture of witchcraft beliefs; gender struggles leading to the creation and re-creation of patriarchy; and structural or major socio-economic transformations, including the formation of private property and of the capitalist market economy. The reference is made to ‘structural or major socio-economic transformations’ in which the creation or re-creation of patriarchy is itself a socio-economic transformation. Witch hunts are the dependent variable, while culture, gender struggles, and structural transformations are the independent variables. So, how do these three independent variables or factors fit together to create the historical experience of witch hunts?

The explanatory scheme is not monocausal; it is multicausal. This can lead to over‐determination, in the sense that two factors may reinforce each other. For instance, gender struggles and other structural transformations may work together to determine women as witches in early modern Europe. At the same time, structural transformations may also explain why men were witches in some instances.

The factor of a culture of witchcraft beliefs, or beliefs in humans acquiring supernatural powers with which they can cause harm to others, has a different status from the other two factors. It is a necessary condition, without which witch hunts cannot take place. Evidence of this proposition is seen in Ronald Hutton's statement that Siberia is the one large cultural region that was without witches (Hutton 2017: 11). There are shamans, who mediate with the supernatural world, but they are benevolent, not malevolent. The Siberian people did not have witch hunts (however, now things may be different, as we noticed in some recent reports). Also, there is some evidence that the Celtic peoples (of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland) had very few witch trials (Hutton 2017: 243). Scotland was the site of a furious witch hunt, as well studied by Christina Larner (1981). But the area of the Scottish witch hunt was on the border with England, and thus subject to the influence of English witch beliefs. However, in upland Scotland the Celtic culture seems to have held sway.