During the European witch hunts, accusations often linked women's bodily cycles, herbal knowledge, and midwifery to demonic pacts. Menstrual blood was sometimes cited in trials as evidence of maleficium. This period intensified fears and isolation around women's reproductive health across Protestant and Catholic regions.

The hunts inspired Gothic and Romantic literature's fascination with female 'otherness' and the supernatural (e.g., in Shelley or Keats). Later poets drew on this history to critique misogyny, using menstrual and witch motifs as symbols of repressed female power in 20th-century feminist poetry.