Throughout most of Europe and its colonies, through the better part of three centuries, accusations of and executions for the crime of witchcraft primarily targeted women – a fact not lost on even the earliest feminist histories (e.g. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Women, Church, and State, 1893). But most early histories of witchcraft tended to downplay issues of gender (see Jan Machielsen, The War on Witchcraft, 2021), while the flowering of witchcraft historiography in the 1970s and 1980s was marred by condescending polemics against ahistorical martyrologies of second-wave feminism such as those of Andrea Dworkin and Starhawk. This changed in the 1990s and early 2000s, when a wave of archivally grounded, theoretically sophisticated, unabashedly feminist scholarship on the witch-trials appeared. Elizabeth Reiss explicated the policing of Damned Women in Puritan New England (1997); Sigrid Brauner depicted witches as the inverse of Protestant Fearless Wives (1995); Deborah Willis (Malevolent Nurture, 1995) and Lyndal Roper (Oedipus and the Devil, 1994) deployed psychoanalytic models to explain misogynist depictions of older women as witches.
Although some degree of gender analysis is now, rightly, standard in any treatment of early modern beliefs and practices related to witchcraft or witch trials, and although that gender analysis is foregrounded in many excellent recent monographs (Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 2013; Erika Gasser, Vexed with Devils, 2017; Laura Kounine, Imagining the Witch, 2018), explicitly feminist analysis has faded from the scholarly study of witchcraft. Popular feminist sensibility informs many mass-market books on witchcraft (Kristen J. Sollee, Witches, Sluts, Feminists, 2017; Sarah Lyons, Revolutionary Witchcraft, 2019), and a feminist ethos remains central to Pagan Witchcraft and to scholarship about it (Laurel Zwissler, Religious, Feminist, Activist, 2018); but feminist engagement seems largely lacking from recent scholarly treatments of historical witchcraft trials or persecutions. Feminist scholars outside the narrow circle of witchcraft history have turned for insight to the writings of feminist scholars who have filled the vacuum thus created with ahistorical narratives that repeat long-debunked tropes and poorly serve the need for a serious feminist engagement with the witch trials (Silvia Federici, Calaban and the Witch, 2004, and Witches, Women-Hunting, and Women, 2018; Mona Chollett, In Defense of Witches, 2023). Let us Discuss!
The journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft invites submissions for a Discussion Forum aimed at reinvigorating the feminist historical study of witchcraft and witch trials, in Europe and by European colonizers, in the period of roughly 1400-1800. Contributions from junior scholars, and from scholars writing from and/or about historically marginalized communities, are especially welcome.
If interested, please send an abstract of about 100-150 words to MRW co-editor Michael Ostling by December 31, 2023, at michael.ostling@asu.edu . Or contact with questions.
Full drafts of those contributions accepted for inclusion in the Discussion Forum will be due April 30 2024. Anticipated publication in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft volume 19.3 (Winter 2024).
Discussion Forum pieces tend to be short (2000-4000 words) and conversational. While they may be theoretically sophisticated and grounded in detailed scholarship, they should also be accessible to audiences across a wide range of disciplines and positionalities. Please write accordingly.
Michael Ostling
