‘Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials’ review: ‘Vigil’ star’s first documentary traces misogyny from 17th century to Andrew Tate

In multiple interviews since its publication in 1985, she’s reiterated that the book is speculative fiction firmly rooted in history. Everything that happens The Handmaid’s Tale has already happened somewhere in the world, either in the distant or more recent past.

For a current example, look no further than Afghanistan, where the return to power of the Taliban in 2021 means that women are once again being brutally subjugated.

Atwood dedicated The Handmaid’s Tale to a possible ancestor, a 17th century Massachusetts woman called Mary Webster, who was accused of being a witch and hanged. Amazingly, she survived.

I imagine Atwood would appreciate the fascinating two-part documentary Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials (Channel 4, Sun, June 23; streaming on channel4.com).

It too makes distinctly troubling connection between the past, the present and a possible future. For her first documentary series, the star of Doctor Foster, Gentleman Jack and Vigil chooses a subject that’s always been close to her heart – and close to her home.

Jones was born in Oldham, about 40km from the village of Pendle in Lancashire, the site of the most notorious witch trials in English history. In Pendle in 1612, 10 people accused of practising witchcraft were hanged. It’s no accident that eight of them were women.

Talking to a variety of historians, she learns that Pendle in the 17th century was very much a religious outlier, a predominantly Catholic community in an overwhelmingly Protestant country.

Rife with poverty and vagrancy, it was viewed with suspicion as a rebellious place full of problematic people: “the dark corner of England” that attracted traitors and misfits.

The documentary does a masterly job of placing the trials and executions in Pendle – which were sparked by a family organising a Good Friday party that was misrepresented in court as a meeting of members of a coven – and the wider hysteria about witches that swept through Europe in the 17th century in the context of the misogyny of the time.

King James I had a paranoia about witches (he was convinced they were persecuting him) and wrote a book on demonology. He never specified a gender in his book, though. It was the ambitious men at his court, all trying to curry favour with him, who decided women who’d sold their souls to the devil were the source of all evil.

The root of this madness lies a book called Malleus Maleficarum, written in the 16th century by Heinrich Kramer, a German clergyman who believed women, with their “uncontrolled sexuality”, were naturally inclined to do the work of the devil. Once choice extract from Malleus Maleficarum reads: “Their minds are warped, twisted like the rib from which Eve was formed. And just as the first woman could not keep faith with God, so all women are faithless.”

Jones is gobsmacked when an academic tells her Kramer, who was celibate, claimed witches chopped off men’s penises and stashed them in trees, or else simply magicked them away. It’s not as much of a stretch as it might seem to connect Kramer’s ravings about emasculation to the modern incel culture, or to the poisonous misogyny of Andrew Tate.

Kramer was a crackpot who was mocked in his lifetime. But the invention of the printing press meant his loony ideas were disseminated to a wide, credulous audience, not least in his native Germany.

Our equivalent of the printing press is the internet, which is even more efficient at spreading misogyny.

Jones travels to Bamburg, the epicentre of the 17th-century hysteria over witchcraft. At the time, she learns, Germany was in the grip of what was called “the little Ice Age”.

Extreme cold caused crop failures. The economy was in a shambles and society had hit rock bottom. What more convenient scapegoat could there be than those evil, witchy women? Ten thousand were executed.

“It’s not about witchcraft, it’s about women,” Jones says. Next Sunday she visits Salem.