Search results
In 1997, Stuart Clark published the first monograph since the time of Jules Michelet to focus on pre-modern ideas about witches. The language of belief in witchcraft studies betrays an anachronistic, modernist and dismissive approach to a mental universe quite different from our own. This book makes the male witch visible, to construct him as a historical subject, as a first step toward a deeper understanding of the functions and role of gender in pre-modern European witch-hunting and ideas about witches. The overtly political dimension to the study of witches in early modern Europe demands a high level of consciousness and reflexivity regarding language, representation, and meaning. William Monter provides a wealth of data about male witches, in an 'unremarkable province' close to 'the heart of northern and western Europe'. Here, men comprised the majority of those tried and executed for witchcraft. The book examines cases in which men were accused of witchcraft. The examples are drawn from several different regions, in order to test conventional generalisations about male witches. The agency theory posits that actors always have choices; 'agent-centred' morality proposes a novel twist on both traditional Kantian internalist categories. The problems of both male and female witches' agency and selfhood are discussed. The book also presents data compiled from ten canonical works, and a brief discussion of demonological illustrations. Finally, it addresses the question of what it means to label a man as a witch within a framework that explicitly and implicitly feminised witchcraft.
demonological misogyny was (see chapter 1 ’s discussion of Stuart Clark’s views), but the focus on women itself has not been challenged. This is understandable, to a point. There is no denying that the major demonological treatises of the period, both those that advocated witch-hunting and those that opposed it, accepted that most witches were women. For example, in their explanation of why more women than men were
witch is as neglected as his female counterpart’,but is,in this particular study,concerned primarily with the female witch.Despite his knowledge that ‘in some areas men were also at risk to be socially constructed as witches’, de Blécourt dismisses male witches by stating that ‘their witchcraft was usually of a different, less malevolent kind and hardly susceptible to prosecution.’ 42 Stuart Clark’s
lends support to Stuart Clark’s argument for a binary structure underlying the gendering of witchcraft; on the other hand, it cautions us against allowing that binary structure to become too rigid to accommodate flexible gender constructions. 1 Ancient and medieval antecedents What did medieval and early modern Europeans think about witches? There was a vast array of ideas, many of them indeed drawn from
especially learned witchcraft theory,and witch-hunting were gender-inclusive, and any scholar who purports to take witches as his or her primary subject would do well to remember this. In the fourth chapter, we introduced the male witch as found in demonological literature. This chapter challenged directly Stuart Clark’s position that male witches were conceptually impossible for early modern witchcraft theorists. We presented data
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
existed. In 1997, Stuart Clark published the first monograph since the time of Jules Michelet to focus on pre-modern ideas about witches. 1 Clark takes early modern ideas about witchcraft seriously; indeed, he devotes his first chapter to the language of witchcraft and the need to take ‘belief’ seriously as a motivating factor. However, Clark and the scholars beginning to follow his lead have retained the language of belief
faced credulous judges. 6 Stuart Clark is surely right that James developed his ‘continental’ views on witchcraft as a diabolic compact and conspiracy of great extent and danger to Christian monarchies some time after 1590. James’s demonology, Clark argues, was responsible for the intense Scottish witch-hunt, which only ceased in 1597, when his Daemonologie was published. But what happened during his reign in England’s less fevered, more sceptical territories from 1603 to 1625? The argument that by the 1610s James had undergone a radical
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
hierarchy. In Robin Briggs’s view, the sabbath concept can be seen as an anti-fertility rite, representing the opposite of the desirable commonweal.30 In learned demonology, descriptions of Satan, Hell and the activities of witches were characterised by ritual backwardness. The whole cosmic order was inverted, the Devil put in the place of God, and the servants of God on earth – the secular and religious magistrates – displaced. Stuart Clark has linked the notions of the world upside down in learned demonology to a general conception of a polar world, found in many areas