The trial of the plants

Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

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Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

— Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

— What we call “lost wisdom” is in truth a knowledge materially destroyed. The grammatical distinction changes everything. —

§0 · A crack to begin with

You have noticed that we no longer know. That you would not dare put a plant on a burn without the internet. That you do not know what to do about a bad cough except wait for the doctor or the pharmacist. That gathering a sprig of dandelion has you checking three websites to see whether it is edible. You tell yourself it is urbanisation, modernity, the disconnection from nature. That is partly true. Above all it is incomplete. The knowledge did not fall into disuse through collective neglect. It was methodically uprooted. And most of the people who carried it died burned alive, strangled at the stake, or hanged. This article tells that material history. It is more disturbing than what is usually said of it.

The reckoning they do not teach you at school

Let us begin with the figures, because nothing is as sober. The serious historical estimates converge around 90,000 to 100,000 witchcraft trials in Europe between 1450 and 1750, about half of which ended in an execution — that is, 40,000 to 60,000 deaths. The broader popular estimates (“9 million witches burned”), taken up by certain feminist currents of the 1970s, have been revised downward by serious historiography — Brian Levack, Robin Briggs, Anne Llewellyn Barstow. But these 40,000 to 60,000 deaths are not a cold statistic. They are, for example, the equivalent of the entire population of the city of Lyon in 1500. Erased. In a century.

And the death toll does not tell the whole story. For every woman executed, several were tortured (torture being the standard method of “obtaining the confession” according to the Malleus Maleficarum of Kramer and Sprenger, 1486, an inquisition manual reprinted 28 times). For every woman tortured, dozens were watched, denounced, harried in their village, kept at a distance by their neighbours. The diffuse terror, lasting five generations, is the principal operator. The visible pyre is only the summit of the apparatus.

Why 1450 — the Federici thesis

Why this date, and not earlier? Why in the full Renaissance, at the dawn of what we are taught to call scientific modernity? The answer was refused by the schoolbooks for a hundred and fifty years. It was reformulated, without concession, by Silvia Federici in 2004 in Caliban and the Witch. Here it is in its nakedness.

From the 11th to the 14th century, rural Europe ran largely on a system of commons — common lands managed collectively, shared rights of use (gathering, grazing, dead wood, water, wild honey). Within these commons, women — and particularly widows, unmarried women, older women with no male guardianship — held a considerable economic and social autonomy. They cared for people (herbalism, childbirth, contraception via plants — mugwort, rue, tansy). They passed on the knowledge of the threshold (death, birth, grief). They regulated the community’s sexuality in a way the Church, at that time, still went along with.

From the 15th century, two processes converge. The first process: the enclosures — the privatisation of the common lands by the lords, then by the rising merchant bourgeoisie. The villages are expropriated. Poor women, who depended particularly on the commons to live (gathering wild medicinal plants, grazing their one and only goat), tip into dependence or begging. The second process: the witch hunt. Federici demonstrates, with the archives to hand, that the regions where the enclosures were most brutal are also those where the trials were most numerous and most violent. The correlation is no coincidence.

Ehrenreich-English — who these women were

Thirty years before Federici, two Americans, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, had published in 1973 a small book that became foundational: Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Their thesis completes Federici’s: to understand who was targeted, you have to look at who practised medicine in Europe before 1450. And the answer is: for the most part, women.

Not women-physicians in the institutional sense — access to the universities was forbidden them, ever since the Council of Reims (1131), which reserved medical teaching to the clergy. But women-healers in the practical sense: midwives, village herbalists, keepers of the threshold of life and death. The knowledge was empirical, passed on orally from mother to daughter or through informal apprenticeship. It was vast. It covered childbirth, contraception, the care of wounds, fevers, the diseases of childhood, the management of death. It was this knowledge — not a rival religion, not a heretical belief — that the pyres targeted.

Merchant — the death of nature

Carolyn Merchant, a historian of science at Berkeley, brought in 1980 — four years before Federici — the third piece of the analysis, in The Death of Nature. Her thesis is complementary: the witch hunt and the mechanistic scientific revolution (Bacon, Descartes, Newton) are not two separate phenomena but two faces of the same civilisational process. Nature, which until the 15th century had been conceived as a living organism — often feminine, often maternal — becomes in the 17th century a machine. The image flips. And with it, the posture one is permitted toward her.

Francis Bacon, in The Masculine Birth of Time (1602–1603), explicitly uses the vocabulary of the inquisition to describe the new science. He writes that nature must be “tortured to make her reveal her secrets,” “put to the question,” “penetrated.” The parallel with what the judges did to the women accused of witchcraft is not an after-the-fact metaphor — it is the image Bacon lays claim to. Modern science is born in the same language as the witch hunt. Merchant demonstrates it, citation after citation. It is disturbing, it is documented.

What the pyres burned, exactly

Let us state it clearly, because it matters for what follows. The pyres did not burn a rival religion — the popular idea of a “witch religion” surviving from pre-Christian paganism (the thesis of Margaret Murray, 1920s) has been refuted by serious historiography since the 1960s. It is not a religion that was eliminated. It is three interdependent things:

One — a practical, material knowledge of plants, the body, childbirth, death. Vast, oral, distributed, non-institutionalised. Destroyed in five generations, never fully reconstituted.

Two — an economic autonomy of poor women, particularly of widows and unmarried women, which depended on the commons and on folk medicine. Destroyed by the enclosures and by institutional medicalisation. Replaced by an economic dependence on the husband or on charity.

Three — an animist grammar of nature, in which the earth, the water, the plants were subjects one entered into relation with, not resources one took. Destroyed by the mechanistic science that forged itself — Bacon, Descartes — in the same punitive language as the judges. Replaced by the grammar of the object to be exploited, which still structures industrial agronomy today.

What this changes for anyone consulting a herbalist, in 2026

This genealogy is not a memorial detour. It changes the right posture toward the herbal knowledge that is returning today. Three practical consequences.

First consequence: do not say “this knowledge had been lost.” It was destroyed. The right word changes the posture. If it is lost, you can freely reinvent it and everyone goes at it with their own version. If it is destroyed, you have a duty of archaeological caution: go back to the survivals, check the sources, do not invent what was killed. This is exactly what Susun Weed, Rosemary Gladstar, Wolf-Dieter Storl or Pierre Gayet in Europe do — they are not making a new herbalism, they are restoring as far as possible an old herbalism with what has survived of it.

Second consequence: honour the lineages that have survived. Italian peasant medicine, the Romani knowledge passed on by Bairacli Levy, the medicine of Hildegard’s abbey taken up by Strehlow, the Appalachian tradition (Crellin) — each is a fragile survival to be respected, not a fashion to be consumed. To confuse them, to mix them without naming their lineages, is to commit the same operation as the enclosures on a cultural scale: to flatten distinct commons into a globalised commodity.

Third consequence: to understand that “soft medicine” is not a gentleness added to modern medicine. It is, historically, that against which modern medicine made itself — by fire, by dispossession, by mechanism. This obliges no war — modern medicine saves lives every day. It obliges historical lucidity: when you drink a mugwort infusion, you are not performing an act “complementary” to medical science. You are joining, modestly, in a modern kitchen, a lineage that five hundred years of pyres and enclosures did not manage to extinguish completely. That is no small thing.