Owing thanks largely to the Malleus, female sexuality became the twisted and distorted obsession of early modern European men. It may be cautiously assumed that these men had become so psychologically deranged, so pathologically affected due to their unbridled religious convictions, that they projected their own guilty and sexually repressed desires and dysfunctions onto their disenfranchised female counterparts, who were generally viewed through the dichotomy of the ‘Madonna-Whore Complex’.
Michael Sherlock – Christian Misogyny: Female Sexuality in the Primary Historical Sources for Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
