In the Central Middle Ages, before the witch-hunt craze of the 16th century, more men than women were accused of sorcery. However, the association of women resorting to unscrupulous and un-Christian ways to fly had become well entrenched by 1500 CE.
In a manuscript called the _canon Episcopi_, which might have been written in the late 800s, an author complained about women who were alleging that they could travel at night as servants of the pagan Goddess Diana.
The scribe Johannes Andreae (d. 1348) accused Beguines – women who had the audacity to take up lives of public religiosity rather than obediently keeping to themselves inside a convent – of flying on the backs of animals. He called them “deceitful and deluded”. Both of the slides here come from the second half of the 1400s, and show women (there are men too in the second image) flying around on brooms. These evildoers belonged to a heretical Christian sect called the Waldensians.
I think an interesting common denominator in these examples is that in all cases, women who fly are definitely exhibiting freedom and power. And in each case, the institutions of the Church and Medieval patriarchy responded to this with vehement condemnation.
You might notice the second image foregrounds a whole crowd of people kneeling. They are standing in line waiting their turn to kiss the goat’s anus. And that is because goats represented the devil in Medieval culture.
Source(s): _The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims _ Rebate Blumenfeld-Koskinski, p 20, U Penn, 2015. First image _Le champion des dames_, by Martin LeFrance, 1451. Second image, Johann Tinctoris, ‘Contra sectam Valdensium,’ c. 1460.
