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.
Contact Email
michael.ostling@asu.edu
