Authors: Diane Purkiss
ISBN-13: 9780415087612, ISBN-10: 0415087619
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
Date Published: October 1996
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Throughout history the figure of the witch has embodied both male nightmare and female fantasy. While early modern women used belief and ritual to express and manage powerful feelings, the symbols and images surrounding the witch in the New World largely distorted the European views of Native American religions. In our own era, groups as diverse as women writers, academic historians and radical feminists have found in the witch a figure who justifies and defines their own identities. And there are many in the 1990s who still call themselves witches.
From colonial narratives to court records and from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, The Witch in History shows how the witch has acted and continues to embody the fears, desires and fantasies of women and men.
Acknowledgements | ||
Introduction | ||
1 | A Holocaust of one's own: the myth of the Burning Times | 7 |
2 | At play in the fields of the past: modern witches | 30 |
3 | The witch in the hands of historians: a tale of prejudice and fear | 59 |
4 | The house, the body, the child | 91 |
5 | No limit: the body of the witch | 119 |
6 | Self-fashioning by women: choosing to be a witch | 145 |
7 | Elizabethan stagings: the witch, the queen, class | 179 |
8 | The all-singing, all-dancing plays of the Jacobean witch-vogue: The Masque of Queens, Macbeth, The Witch | 199 |
9 | Testimony and truth: The witch of Edmonton and The Witches of Lancashire | 231 |
10 | The witch on the margins of 'race': Sycorax and Others | 250 |
Conclusion: bread into gingerbread and the price of transformation | 276 | |
Index | 286 |