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Title: Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts by Anne Llewellyn Barstow ISBN: 0-06-250049-X Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: January, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.29 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A desperate portrait of the great witch hunts.
Comment: I took a course that investigated witch trials, and found this book to be the absolute most informative and responsible investigation.
While Barstow is not claiming misogyny to be the single cause of the European "witchcraze" (as some would believe), she looks at misogyny as key feature of the trials. Her claim is that the arrival of witch trials in Europe presented a means for misogynist acts to take place. In many regions (particularly central Europe) women were specifically targetted for their sins: lustfullness, weak-mindedness, greed, temptresses, sexual infidelity, etc. Women were being targeted in large numbers because they were women. Widows and spinsters were seen to be the most dangerous by the people in charge (men). In areas (Russia) where women weren't so highly targeted, there were other societal mechanisms of misogyny. Also, women weren't seen as capable to perform magic as men.
Barstow sees the witch trials as a past expression of the ! continuing woman-fearing and hating that occurs in our world. Though more subtle forms continue today, she cites that we remain in a world with female-genital mutilation in Africa and wife-burning in India. Widespread rape and wife-beating in the USA would be another form of this. The witch trials were a particularly disturbing form of historical misogyny in early modern Europe.
The witch trials were a phenomenon in which the majority of victims were women. Most scholarly accounts tend to ignore or gloss-over this fact. This original account offers much of which is missing in the rest of the literature.
Rating: 4
Summary: Useful overview that gets to the heart of it
Comment: I've read the other reviews which consistantly deny Barstow's premise: that the Witch Craze was the women's holocaust. Just read the book: and any other that attempts to break down by gender the numbers of those tortured and killed. Why gender? Because it is the single most glaring pattern in the witch persecutions!
The Maleficius (handbook for persecuting witches) does not implicate male sexuality as a reason for torturing them, as it consistantly implicates women's sexuality. It does not mention how to 'recognize' male witches, but it begins from the premise that women 'live by the moon and so are able to draw the hearts of men toward the pagans,' and thus, witches are women because only they were 'weak' enough to fall prey to the devil. Interesting, isn't it, how the artists and writers of the period always portray witches as women, from Shakespeare to Holbein? Don't blame Anne Barstow, just look for the overwhelming pattern, as she has done.
That said, there are a few weaknesses in the book. One, although she tries to nail the number of those killed, she still comes up short. Anecdotally, I visited the town of Osnabruck, Germany, this summer and discovered their numbers of murders of women were around 400, give or take, from two eras of persecution in the 16th and 17th Centuries. I returned home to check Witch Craze, and Osnabruck never made it into the index. It's numbers of dead are not included, though it is common knowledge to anyone who visits the tourist center. Huh? What else was left out?
Nor does Barstow adequately plumb the numbers who were tortured and maimed and then released, or those who died in custody. She does not draw a line from the witch persecutions to the rise of the legal profession. We know that women were targeted for political and sexist reasons, but Barstow does not go into detail about who the male witches were: were they shamans, convenient scapegoats for natural disasters, homosexuals, or political enemies of the nobility? Don't know.
I await a book which discusses the intersection of European pagan life and the witch craze. I believe that while Europe's women may not have been sorcerers, they, and small town folk in general, certainly were among the last people of the continent who maintained the pagan folk traditions of pre-Christian Europe. Traditionally, throughout native cultures, men are first to shed their traditional ways, usually for pragmatic economic reasons, while rural women carry the rituals on: though food preparation, childcare and healthcare methods, costuming, commemorating holidays, and so on. Is there some corollary there between native European culture as practiced by householders and the witch craze? Not mentioned, and doesn't have to be. But to my mind, it is an incomplete work that doesn't mention the collision of historical folk culture with the dominant christian culture and how it effected or affected the persecution of women.
Yet Witch Craze is an important book to read and own. Barstow's single most important contribution, I believe, is to paint a picture of how women and men would have reacted to 500 years of mostly female persecution--the resulting fragmentation of society, the housewifeization of women, the entrenchment of ageism, and the suspicion and fear of self-directed mysticism and spirituality--these are the legacies of the Witch Craze that imprint us all still.
Rating: 1
Summary: Author's bias- the bane of the history student!
Comment: I first read this book last year when I began studying Early-Modern Witchcraft at Monash University. Barstow's work was misleading then when I knew little on the topic, and laughable now that I know much, much more. Barstow had a pre-conceived idea of what she she wanted to say, and either didn't bother to find, or omitted anything that didn't fit in with her theory. This book says more about feminist politics than Witchcraft history. Gender was the primary focus of her study, and Barstow's world is only understandable in terms of gender (as opposed to the equally important socio-economic, religious and racial factors). Furthermore she believes that only women have gender, this shows an appaling lack of study for more and more accounts are appearing, not only of male witchcraft, but of male gender history.
Witchcraft was too widespread and went on for too long to be so easily pidgeon-holed into terms as obvious or basic as gender. Historical representations of witchcraft should be taken on a case by case basis. Creating "models" for witchcraft (Barstow's elderly, marinalised female among others) does not help the issue, it confuses it.
Anyone starting out serious study in this field would do better to read works by Dianne Purkiss, Deborah Willis or books pertaining to the case in Salem of Hugh Parsons who was the primary witch, his wife the secondary-where does this fit in to Barstow's model? Also, if you must read Barstow- also read the possession at Loudun(Certeau's or Rapley's) to see a witch trial that is the exact opposite of Barstows "norm". To fellow scholars I'd say read Barstow if only to see how one's political agendas or bias can effect your study. Be objective, keep reading and get all sides of the story!
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Title: Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History (Middle Ages Series) by Alan Charles Kors, Edward Peters ISBN: 0812217519 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (2nd Edition) by Brian P. Levack ISBN: 058208069X Publisher: Longman Pub. Date: 04 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: The Malleus Maleficarum of Kramer and Sprenger by Montague Summers ISBN: 0486228029 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 June, 1971 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History by Alan C. Kors, Edward Peters ISBN: 0812210638 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: December, 1972 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: In the Devil's Snare : The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton ISBN: 037540709X Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 10 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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