Femaleness and the stereotype of the anti-mother mingled with that of old age: the maleficent, lonely hag who searched for young, healthy life to restore lost youth. These ideas suggest that the potency of the witch relied strongly on the body - an ageing woman, who could no longer give birth, and who spread a distorted maternal power which destroyed instead of nurtured. Being the liquid through which life was brought forth inside the individual, blood can be seen as the ideal symbol of the struggle between the witch and the victim.
Lyndal Roper, who has focused on elderly harmless women as the principal victims of the hunts in early modern Germany, has emphasised the theme of female- female rivalry, entailing the preservation of existence, fertility and child-bearing, in
120
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 161-179. Laurie A. Finke, “Mystical
Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision.” In Ulrike Wiethaus (ed.), Maps of Flesh and Light. The Religious
Experience of Medieval Women Mystics. (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993), pp. 41-42.
Claire Marshall, “The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms of Female Devotion in the Late Middle Ages.” In Darryll Grantley, Nina Taunton (eds). The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Culture. (Great Britain: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), pp. 11-18
121
Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen. Preaching and Popular Devotion in the
67 which old, sterile women were opposed to mothers, children and young women, driven in their evil-doing by the feeling of envy.122 Examining the English context of witchcraft, Malcolm Gaskill has pointed out four categories in which it could be located:
- religious deviance and secular crime
- an explanation for misfortune and a focus for blame - an expression and manifestation of fear and anger - a potential source of power.123
These indicators are useful, characterising the mentalities of the accusers and the accused, and, except for the first point which had its origin in the theological debate, they can be adopted to explain the stereotype of the old witch. Useless and weak in the social scale of values, she symbolically and physically embodied proximity with the end of life, and so became a perfect scapegoat in which the community could recognize and destroy its deepest anxieties.
As we have seen regarding the symbolism of Gog and Magog, while inside society the old woman was marginalized, such marginalization became a source for a dangerous power redirected towards the community. Weakness was inverted in otherworldly strength. The ageing individual acquired grotesque connotations, the monstrosity of the approaching death, which affected the internal balance, stopped reproduction and changed the physical abilities of the person. In terms of blood and power it seems that while the fluid was weakened in its living principles, it was otherwise enforced in its deadly ones. Opposite to the maternal womb the old body was the gateway to sickness and decay. This physical reality merged well with the alleged social position of such women, widows or spinsters, poor and deprived of rights.124 If the stereotype seems valuable for certain contexts, the trials demonstrate that not all witches were old, female or characterised by a weak social and economical status. It is correct, as we have done, to speak of the ageing female witch as a stereotyped figure, which allowed several exceptions that can be dismissed. As it has been widely discussed by Robin Briggs for the cases of Lorraine and by Alison
122
Lyndal Roper, Witch-Craze, pp. 80-81
123
Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 78
124
68 Rowlands for the German case of Appolonia Glaitter, old age was not always synonymous with poverty, disease and marginalization. Elderly or middle-aged people accused of witchcraft could instead be rich, healthy and powerful. Also the age of the accused at the time of the trials did not necessarily correspond to the first accusations: reputation played an important role and developed over the years.125 Men could be accused of witchcraft. In some countries and regions, such as Iceland, Finland and Normandy, male witches were in the majority. Children also figured in some trials in eighteenth-century Germany and they played an important role as accusers in Sweden, where they testified to have taken part in sabbaths.126 As Christina Larner has famously stated, “all women were potential witches”, but not all witches were women: witchcraft was “sex-related”, not “sex-specific”. Although many of its prevalently feminine aspects are undeniable, it is primary true that
witches were persecuted as witches, that is for their allegiance with the Devil and for
the suspect of maleficium; not because they were just women.127 Witchcraft ran in the blood, that is it was to be found in different generations of the same families, so it was possible to transmit it as a legacy to both male and female descendents. It has also been argued that a gendered society produced a gendered magic. Exploring the Dutch context, Willem de Blécourt has distinguished a female harmful magic from a male enriching one. Although both men and women could act through witchcraft using the same practices, the results seemed quite different. The patriarchal society was transferred and disrupted in the world of witches, where the man, maintaining his cultural place of control, was transformed into the witch who used magic for his own benefit, while the woman was changed to an unlucky aggressor, never able to have a minimum gain from her wasting actions and ruled by another male-character, the Devil himself.128 Yet, men could also be accused of employing female magic. If it is true that in the witch trials male witches were not treated differently from female- ones, a fundamental point is that, as Apps and Gow have underlined, they were often “associated with certain traits that feminised them implicitly”.129
125
Robin Briggs, Witches and :eighbours, pp. 228-229. Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany”
126
Robin Briggs, Witches and :eighbours, pp. 224-226
127
Christian Larner, Enemies of God, pp. 92-93.
128
Willem De Blècourt, “The Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period”. Gender and History, vol.12 No 2 (July 2000), pp. 298-300
129
69 We have discussed the magic of witches as deeply rooted in their physical persons and in the complex link between the body and soul expressed by blood. In the attempt to resolve the problem of gender, to explain why, although everyone could be accused, women were the ‘best’ witches,130 I am going to consider a case in which a male witch operated as a female one.
The historian Malcolm Gaskill has explored the accusations made against the seventeenth-century middle-aged Kent farmer William Godfrey. John and Susan Barber, who rented Godfrey’s property in 1609, testified how the man had attacked Susan during childbirth, sending to her his familiar spirits to take the infant away, and also how, after being refused the piglets he wanted to buy from John because they were too young, he had bewitched the livestock, drying up the sow’s milk, causing the consequent impaired growth of the piglets and the mysterious death of several horses. When Margaret and William Holton, who lived in the same house between 1613 and 1615, found the laundry mysteriously sprinkled with what looked like blood, suspicion was immediately directed towards Godfrey, whose evil influence was also suspected when their one-year-old child sickened and died.131 According to the accusations, Godfrey stopped the flow of milk, spoiled food, and injured and eventually killed children. He was also the contrary of the witch-stereotype: he was not old (and certainly he was not post-menopausal), he was not poor and he was not a woman. Yet he was accused of maleficium in 1617 and his magic followed the same patterns we have met with in the case of the female witch. Living inside a community, Godfrey was not free from the possibility of conflicts involving economic pressures and the emotional sphere of envy, fear, suspicion and desire which dwell inside every human society, and that, as Gaskill has written, led his neighbours to perceive him as a witch. But he also had the supposed power to harm because he was not excluded from the domain of bodily fluids on which witchcraft relied, and on which both social tensions and religious anxieties were reflected. The criminal “raw power”, in Robin Briggs’ definition of the witch,132 did not spread directly from him or her but passed through the agent, using the unstable energy of the body, being primarily dangerous for him or herself. The potential
130
Edward Bever, “Witchcraft, female aggression, and power in the early modern community.”
Journal of Social History, vol. 35, No.4 (Summer 2002), p. 957
131
Malcolm Gaskill, “The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England.” Historical Research, Vol.71 No. 175 (June 1998), pp. 142-171
132
70 aggressor encapsulated the anxieties and the beliefs connected with a fluid body which was placed on the threshold of life and death. In this regard some bodies gained more power than others, but everyone underwent the inevitable process of decay and corruption to which both the physical and spiritual condition were linked. Beyond the witch it is this bodily evidence which was feared and permeated the world through blood, which brought spiritual redemption and natural life, but also disruption and death, either empowering or endangering the human identity.
71