Today’s Bloody Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The classic witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum (1486) stated, “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” This summed up the widespread belief that women were by nature oversexed, and therefore dangerous to men. It is not surprising that many demonologists stressed the witch’s ability to render a man impotent, even to cause his genitals to disappear, for the witchcraze took place during a period when women were perceived as sexually omnivorous. In these proscriptions we find that the most disgusting part of women’s disgusting bodies was there menstrual blood. When Stevenote de Audebert showed the witch hunter Pierre de Lancre her pact with Satan written in menstrual blood, he was horrified to look at it. But not too horrified; his fascination overcame his disgust. One must ask why she showed it to the man who boasted he had tortured some six hundred persons, and who put to death eighty, in a brief four-month tour of southwestern France. It is likely that Stevenote was proud of this document. At any rate, showing it to de Lancre was her undoing, for she was burned at the stake.
Culled from: Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts