As I told you in the previous post, beer was still in the hands of women. But the case of Hildegarda (with her economic and intellectual independence as abbess of a monastery), was totally exceptional. Normally, married women did not have legal status, and single women…. Well better not be a single woman. This situation of vulnerability prevented them from accessing the economic and technological developments that gradually transformed Europe from an agrarian society to a commercial one.
Most European women continued to drink and brew (from Germanic women who brewed in forest clearings to avoid invaders from the Holy Roman Empire to English women who maintained their traditions until the Industrial Revolution) but their situation was increasingly precarious. And why did they keep making beer at home? It was a matter of survival for the family, this homemade drink was still less dangerous than water and more nutritious. And if there was a little surplus, it was sold. But the licenses were now in the name of the husbands . Thus, they continued working, but the product was no longer theirs. And neither did the money he gave.
And then we go from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance. During this time the Inquisition spread throughout Europe, and a wave of religious fanaticism killed thousands of people, the vast majority of whom were women (in Germany alone, between 1500 and 1782, 25,000 women accused of witchcraft were executed). It was easy enough to accuse you of witchcraft: if you picked herbs to soothe a stomach ache, you were probably a witch. If you lived alone you would surely be a witch. If you knew how to turn dirty water into a delicious liquid by adding herbs and with certain recipes…. you were almost certainly a witch. And this is where the close relationship between beer and witch hunts comes from.
Let's recap: at this time, it was the women who produced the beer in large foaming cauldrons in their kitchen, they often had cats to keep away the mice that ate the grain, they indicated that in that house sold beer by hanging a broom on the door and when they went to the market, they put on a big pointy hat to be seen above the crowd... does that ring a bell?
Cauldrons, pointy hats, brooms, cats... brewer women are the origin of some of the most famous stereotypes of witchcraft. Although no record of the inquisition is known in which they are directly accused of beer production, women were accused of making concoctions that altered consciousness and put them in a state of intoxication, to carry out covens and abuse men. And the height of irony is when these women were accused of being to blame for the beer going bad.
“In a culture where beer defines part of the national character, the question of who controls the drink is paramount”, observes a writer from the German Beer Institute. Accusing women of witchcraft allowed men to have absolute control of the sector. They built production breweries and formed international trade guilds, where only men could be. By the year 1700, European women had stopped brewing.