A cutoff-safe Guardian essay reports that women were about 80% of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 defendants in European witch persecutions, an authored, book-linked historical synthesis rather than a pooled systematic review or independent verification of every cited study. [1]

That caution follows the paper's treatment of Turing's manuscript as a revelatory fragment still bounded by transcription, dating, custody, and provenance.

The essay separately cites Carol Karlsen's New England findings: women from families without male heirs were 64% of prosecuted women, 76% of the women found guilty, and 89% of the women executed in that studied record, not percentages of all European defendants. [1]

It also cites 1,714 suspected-bewitchment incidents in Richard Napier's casebooks, a record of incidents rather than people prosecuted, found guilty, or executed that cannot be combined with the European estimate or New England ratios. [1]

Inheritance, labor competition, licensing, evidentiary institutions, and property transfer are mechanisms discussed across distinct places and periods, not one universal cause; the underlying study texts and methods, denominators, archival survival, selection, regional and period variation, competing interpretations, property records, and independent scholarly review still limit how far the synthesis can travel before any universal conclusion is drawn beyond this authored synthesis.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin