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The Diabolical Sensorium: Gender, Witches, and the Senses During the Early Modern Period
- Nuri@Atropos
- Oct 28
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 29
In Early Modern Europe, witchcraft was as much a sensory threat as a moral or theological one. In the Witch Trials, the witch was imagined as possessing penetrating supernatural senses that could harm people by simply sensing them. To accuse a woman of witchcraft was to accuse her of perceiving, feeling, and knowing the world in a fiendish way. She embodied the diabolically corrupted form of the female senses. The brilliant Constance Classen referred to this as the Diabolical Sensorium, a perversion of the senses that mirrored the perceived moral inversion of the witch herself. Each of the five senses was thought to have been corrupted and weaponised through diabolical influence. The imagining of the witch's sinister senses during the Witch Trials reveals how sensory fear shaped both gender ideology and social control in Early Modern Europe.
The Feminine Sensorium
In Medieval and Early Modern thought, the senses were hierarchically ordered. The higher senses, such as sight and hearing, were aligned with the intellect, reason, and masculinity. Lower senses such as touch, taste, and smell were linked to the body, emotion, and femininity. Witch-hunters took these long-standing gendered hierarchies and turned them into a diabolical female sensorium in which every sense was dedicated to evil. The witch became the anti-saint. The witch corrupts the senses to humanity's destruction, while the saint uses them for salvation.
This sensorial corruption was done as part of an elaborate conspiracy theory imagining the witch as a secret agent working towards demonic world domination. The witch's body, already coded as excessive and unruly, became a vessel through which sensory corruption entered the world and brought about the Anti-Christ.
The witch's senses were thus dangerous. She saw what others could not, felt what she should not, and produced sensations that threatened the boundary between the human and demonic. This inversion of the sensory order was central to Early Modern constructions of female danger. In demonological writings such as the Malleus Maleficarum, sensory excess was not simply a symptom of sin but the instrument of it. In a reversal of long-held doctrinal positions, the Malleus Maleficarum held that the devil dwelt within the senses and could seduce humans into darkness through simple acts of perceiving.
"The devil places himself in figures, he adapts himself to colours, he attaches himself to sounds, he lurks in angry and wrongful conversation, he abides in smells, he impregnates with flavours and fills with certain exhalations all the channels of the understanding" (Malleus Maleficarum, 32).
The Senses of the Witch
Touch: The Corrupting Hand
Touch was the sense most closely associated with women, domestic labour, and sexuality. In witchcraft narratives, it is also the medium of contagion with the diabolical. A witch's touch could wither crops, cause impotence, steal penises, seduce the righteous, or transmit disease. Men feared losing strength or virility through physical contact, as if feminine touch could drain life itself. Midwives and healers (as women whose livelihoods depended on touch) were particularly vulnerable to suspicion. The witch's hand, once emblem of care in the Middle Ages, was recast as an instrument of decay.
Inquisitors often described the witch's touch as unnatural or cold, suggesting both a physical and moral inversion of maternal warmth. It was the physical manifestation of the witch as the anti-mother and anti-saint. By touching the world differently, the witch violated not only nature but the social order that relied on, and expected women's touch to be nurturing.
Taste: Poisons and Avarice Appetites
Taste connected women to the domestic sphere through cooking and feeding, yet through the Diabolical Sensorium, nourishment became danger. The witch was imagined as a poisoner, a corrupter of food and drink. Her knowledge of herbs, once valued in folk medicine, made her vulnerable to suspicion of deceit.
In trial records, witches were accused of feeding children tainted food, participating in satanic feasts, eating desecrated hosts, and engaging in cannibalism. These stories inverted the nurturing mother into the cannibal or poisoner. The witch's mouth, associated with both eating and speaking, symbolised appetite without restraint. Taste, as an intimate act of incorporation, became a site of fear. So, through eating or feeding, the witch could infect others with evil.
Smell: Malevolent Odours
Smell occupied an ambiguous place in the sensory hierarchy. It is invisible yet penetrating, intimate yet uncontrollable. The witch's odour was thought to betray her inner corruption and diabolical association. Most odour-based testimony during the trials describes witches emitting foul stenches. Yet even smelling good suggested the witch was using perfumes, incense, or glamour to seduce and deceive. In both cases, smell marked the boundary between purity and pollution. However, there was no bodily odour that the accused could present that could exonerate her of witchcraft; all bodily states became evidence of corruption.
Theologians often linked stench to sin and sanctity to fragrance; saints were said to exude the Odor Sanctitatis (the Odour of Sanctity), while witches reeked of Foetor Peccati (the Stench of Corruption) and Foetor Diaboli (the Stench of Hell). These were not metaphors during the Witch Trials but physical and olfactory manifestations of one's spiritual state that examiners could perceive.
The witch's smell, whether seductive or repulsive, expressed anxiety about the female body's uncontrollable emissions: menstrual blood, sweat, and sexual scents, which the deodorising hands of Early Modern administrators could not control. The witch's olfactory power thus made her a pollutant in both a moral and environmental sense, capable of corrupting the air itself, a human embodiment of miasma.
Sight: The Evil and Ravishing Eye
Sight was the most privileged and masculine of senses, associated with reason, distance, and control. To look was to dominate. The witch's gaze, therefore, represented an inversion of patriarchal vision. The evil eye (the power to harm by looking) condensed fears about female agency and visibility. A woman who saw too much or looked too directly was suspect.
In Early Modern visual culture, witches were depicted as both seeing and being seen: naked, exposed and visually powerful. The witch's sight was imagined as intrusive and predatory, capable of penetrating others' bodies. The witch could walk about naked without fear, for her eyes could repay any unwanted advances tenfold. In a culture that prized female modesty and submission, such active seeing was intolerable. The witch's eyes took on the masculine role, making men the vulnerable and penetrated party. Thus, the witch's eye became an organ of aggression, a literal embodiment of the fear that women might possess not only vision but penetration, be it through insight or physical force. The act of gouging out the eyes of the witch before her burning became both a prophylactic measure against this ravishing sight and a recalibration of the social gaze back to the masculine.
Hearing and Speech: The Voice of the Witch
Hearing, often paired with speech, was central to witchcraft accusations. Witches were said to hear demons whispering or to understand the secret language of spirits. Their speech, through curses, charms, or seductive persuasion, could bewitch others. The Malleus Maleficarum warned that women's voices "sting while they delight," combining allure and danger. In many confessions, witches admitted to having heard the devil's voice or to chanting incantations. Instead of this being evidence of mental illness, it became proof of diabolical sensing.
Classen suggests that this auditory dimension reflects anxieties about women's verbal power. To listen to forbidden knowledge or to speak without authorisation was to challenge ecclesiastical and masculine authority. The witch's ear and tongue thus became organs of disobedience, hearing what should not be heard, saying what should not be said.
The Social Function of the Diabolical Sensorium
The construction of the witch's diabolical senses served multiple cultural functions. It reinforced gender hierarchies by mapping sin onto the female body and its sensory domains. It justified persecution by framing women's everyday activities (touching, cooking, speaking) as potential conduits of evil. It provided a language through which theological anxiety could be experienced sensorily and materially.
As Classen and David Howes note, Early Modern Europe was undergoing a transformation of the senses. Wision and hearing were increasingly privileged as rational and spiritual, while touch, taste, and smell were demoted as bodily, suspect, and feminine. The witch embodied the reversal of the hierarchy; she lived in the world of the lower senses. Her sensorium was not only diabolical but pre-modern, representing everything that rational modernity sought to suppress.
The concept of the Diabolical Sensorium reveals that witchcraft fears were not purely intellectual or doctrinal. They were visceral and rooted in the sensory fabric of everyday life. By corrupting each sense, the witch threatened to dissolve the boundaries between the body and soul, the self and other, purity and pollution.
Witchcraft accusations were a sensory phenomenon of deeply embodied social control. The witch's senses were imagined as extensions of a world in which the body itself was dangerous. In demonising her sensorium, Early Modern society also defined its own sensorium as clean, masculine, rational, and safely distanced from the corporeal.
The witch's downfall thus secured the triumph of the modern senses.
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Sources
Classen, Constance. "The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity." In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Classen, Constance. The Colour of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination. London: Routledge, 1998.
Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Malleus Maleficarum (1487), trans. Montague Summers, 1928 edition.
"The Gendering of Witchcraft." In Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe, edited by Alison Rowlands. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Muchembled, Robert. A History of the Devil: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
Jiménez-Rolland, M., & Gensollen, M. A subtle aesthetic touch in the experience of art. (2025). https://core.ac.uk/download/665166450.pdf