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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.
As the previous chapter showed, the prevailing view in witchcraft studies is that male witches were rare exceptions to the rule and are less important and interesting, as historical subjects, than female witches. There is a kind of conventional historiographical wisdom about male witches, which may be summarised as follows: male witches were a) accused in small numbers; b) accused primarily because
witches doing in these demonological texts?’ and ‘Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?’ Not every single question that arises in the course of a research project can be answered, and this volume leaves certain issues essentially untouched. We have attempted, however, to address what we believe are the most fundamental questions. Chapter 1 tackled the first of these,namely,why male witches are not more
causes of witch-hunting,and those scholars who resist feminist theories and interpretations. 6 The female witch has become a site for struggles over historical method and feminist politics, but there is very little room in the research agenda for the male witch,even though men comprised 20 to 25 per cent of the total number of executed witches. What work there is on male witches tends to be limited, for the most part,to enumeration
. Female and male witches Research is always most exciting when the data do not quite fit the established paradigms and explanatory models. An entire body of literature, mainly by avowed feminists,has argued that witch-hunting was in essence woman-hunting, despite the fact that many of those executed for the crime of witchcraft were men (see chapter 2 ).Various attempts have been made to explain away this feature of witch
So far, we have concentrated on constructing the male witch as a valid historical subject. In this final chapter, we wish to change gear and attempt to answer the question of how early modern Europeans, specifically witchcraft theorists, made sense of male witches. Given that they generally associated witchcraft more strongly with women than with men, it seems at first rather odd that early modern
The previous chapters presented challenges to generalisations about male witches. The next two chapters follow a similar approach to conventional perspectives on the demonological treatment of witchcraft and gender. Through the examination of witchcraft theorists’ descriptions of male witches, we aim to show that, just as with the ‘real life’ cases, modern scholars’ views do not take sufficient
MacDonald; Designer, Kenny Miller. Gerard Murphy as Macbeth – Anne Myatt as Lady Macbeth only woman on stage – all male witches. 2001–2 A Midsummer Night’s Dreamy October/November 2001. Director, Giles Havergal
specific to women, even if women have been foregrounded in studies relating to both concepts. We have seen that it was quite possible that a majority, even a large majority, of accused witches in a given region might be men. Ideas about male witches and accusations against them may have differed somewhat from those concerning women, but in general they were more alike than unlike. Therefore, we must apply questions regarding
of witches and male witches must be viewed in conjunction with a weakening of the economy from 1590 onwards. Heavy production losses heralded the crisis of the seventeenth century and were the cause of high corn prices in Burgundy and other areas and, to make matters worse, were accompanied in the Alpine regions by long winters and cold summers. 58 However, these objective factors still do not explain