Witchcraze: New History of the European Witch Hunts: New History of the European Witch Hunts, a - Softcover

Anne Llewellyn Barstow

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062510363 ISBN 13: 9780062510365

Publisher: Bravo Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

A brilliant, authoritative feminist history that examines the unrecognized holocaust--an "ethnic cleansing" of independent women in Reformation Europe--and the residual attitudes that continue to influence our culture.

About this title

From the Author:

Favorable review in CHURCH HISTORY journal
From Anne Barstow I am the author of WITCHCRAZE: A NEW HISTORY OF THE EUROPEAN WITCH HUNTS. I am submitting the following review, published in CHURCH HISTORY 65.2 (June, 1996). -- Anne Barstow.

This is not a book for weak-stomached patriarchs. But the rest of us - historians of Christianity, feminist theorists, European social and economic historians, theologians, and ethicists - will find reason to be grateful to Barstow for her wide-ranging and provocative comparative analysis of European witchcraze, witch hunters, and their female victims from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

Barstow has reviewed the burgeoning literature on the persecution of women as witches with two purposes: first, to place the "fact" of gender (which she carefuly establishes from the evidence) at the center of her argument, and second, from a rich if necessarily erratic (because of great gaps in the evidence) comparative analysis to uncover the preconditions apparently essential for a society to turn to intense persecutions of witches.

We are all aware that most witches were women but, Barstow argues very convincingly, we have failed to take that fact seriously in our interpretations and analyses. Scholarly attention has focused on the witch hunters, all male, rather than on the historically silent victims (generally between 80 and 90 percent female). And because the descriptions of what was done to those women is so graphic and gruesome, we have turned aside rather than see clearly the terrifying hatred of women, women's bodies, and women's sexuality in the accusations, confessions, structures of inquiry and judgment, and forms of torture and ultimate execution.

Why would European society turn against its own women, even the poor and marginal, developing a "theory" of women and a theology, if one can call it that, of the devil and of evil? The work of European male elites in suppressing the last remnants of a lively local folk culture, with its belief in magic, its receptivity to women healers, and its custom-based methods of conflict regulation within local communities, is part of Barstow's complex answer. The jurisdiction of secular courts (more willing to use torture than ecclesiastical officials), weak central authority (as in the regions of the Holy Roman Empire), the two Reformations of the period, and elite belief in diabolism seem to have been central factors. In the last chapter, several extremely interesting linkages are suggested between the persecution of witches and the rapid growth of colonialism, with its concomitant slaughter and enslavement of indigenous populations on several continents. Is witchcraze an early part of the story of the rapid development of the modern state and the spread of individualism (for elite European males only, of course) and market capitalism?

The Christian churches, then as in our own century, were not simply bystanders to this gratuitous violence against a class of people. Equally troubling in Barstow's analysis are the obvious parallels with the practices of Christian anti-Semitism. (Nazi rhetoric ridiculed Jewish men as "effeminate," an ancient and ominous "linkage," now perhps more intelligible.) A fully adequate account of the history of European Christianity must somehow grapple with Barstow's questions. -- Penny Gill, Mt. Holyoke College.

Synopsis:

Explores the history of the annihilation of more than seven million women of spirit and intelligence under the guise of the "witch hunts" of Europe. The book examines the persecution of women in order to scapegoat them for the ills of society, comparing their situation to that of the American Indians and African slaves. Barstow traces the backlash against women to its frightening European origins, contributing to the growing understanding of our legacy of violence against women.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bravo Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0062510363
• ISBN 13: 9780062510365
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272