This seminar will focus on the gendering of sanctity, heresy, and diabolic witchcraft in premodern Europe. It will explore the possible connection among the rise in the public standing of saintly women, the persecution of dissenting religious groups in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, and the invention of the diabolic sect of witches, which paved the way to early modern witch-hunting. The sources that we will discuss in the seminar include inquisitorial proceedings against heretics, hagiographic texts and witch-hunting manuals.