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Fictional witches congregate more thickly now than they did in early modern times, and all scepticism and comedy have vanished. If you have lately leafed through any book in the fantasy section of a bookshop, you are likely to have encountered the neo-pagan midwife witch in a cottage. She has her origins in the neo-pagan movement’s efforts to appropriate the history of the witch trials as a myth of martyrdom. Alarmingly, such popular fiction has parted company with the idea that the accused witches had done nothing at all, and suggested instead that they were bursting with scientific and occult prowess. These mixes of fantasy and history have worrying potential to confuse.

And yet we might also need some bad witches, sometimes, because not all of us are nice, not all of the time. There is a mother in Buffy the Vampire Slayer who longs for her own youth as a cheerleader and takes over the young, clumsy body of her daughter through witch powers. This correctly locates the awkward boundlessness between daughter and mother while addressing the witch’s maternal ferocity—devouring and pushing. My own dream witch is by Jane Gardam, just a plain story about a woman whose yard is a little too neat, and whose food is too solid, and who makes you feel sick and sullen without knowing why. This story takes the reader into the actual mental world of those who feared and prosecuted witches, and thus opens up to them a piece of history that others seem eager to close.

Further Reading

Butterworth, Philip, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge, 2010).

Clauss, James Joseph and Johnston, Sarah Iles, eds, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art (Princeton, 1997).

Friesen, Ryan Curti, Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture (Eastbourne, 2009).

Gibson, Marion, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London, 1999).

Heng, Geraldine, ‘Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory’, in Thelma S. Fenster, ed., Arthurian Women (London, 2000), 97–114.

Knepper, Janet, ‘A Bad Girl Will Love You to Death: Excessive Love in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory’, in Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, eds, On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries (Dallas, TX, 2001), 229–44.

(p. 140) Knutson, Roslyn L. and McInnis, David, eds, ‘The Lost Plays Database’ (Melbourne, 2009),

<http://www.lostplays.org/index.php/Main_Page> (accessed 30 August 2012).

Lamb, Mary Ellen, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (London, 2006).

Ogden, Daniel, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford, 2009).

Paster, Gail Kern, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1993).

Purkiss, Diane, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London, 1996).

Saunders, Corinne, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge, 2010).

Taylor, Gary, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford, 2007).

Willis, Deborah, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1995).

Willis, Deborah, ‘Magic and Witchcraft’, in Arthur F. Kinney, ed., A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 2002), 135–44.

Notes:

(1) I am grateful for the invaluable assistance of Bronwyn Johnston in researching and writing this chapter.

(2) Jacqueline DiSalvo, ‘Fear of Flying: Milton on the Boundaries between Witchcraft and Inspiration’, English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), 114–37.

(3) Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1995); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1993); Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna G. Singh, Wayward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (New York, 1994); Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991).

(4) Euripides, Medea, tr. Robin Robertson (New York, 2009).

(5) Seneca his tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh, tr. J. Heywood (London, 1581), 2.90. See also The Seventh Tragedie of Seneca, Entitled Medea, tr. J. Studley (London, 1566); Seneca: Tragedies, ed. and tr. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA, 1917), ii, 807–8. My translation.

(6) See the essays in James Joseph Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, eds, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art (Princeton, 1997).

(7) Theocritus, Idylls, tr. Robert Wells (Manchester, 1988), 60.

(8) A found poem, like a found object, involves the use of an object which has not been designed for an artistic purpose, but which exists for another purpose and is taken up aesthetically. Found objects may be utilitarian manufactured items, or natural objects.

(9) Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts (Oxford, 2009), 231.

(10) Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York, 2003), 8.34.

(11) Malory, Morte D’Arthur, i, 281.3–20.

(12) Janet Knepper, ‘A Bad Girl Will Love You to Death’, in Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, eds, On Arthurian Women (Dallas, TX, 2001), 229–44. See also Geraldine Heng, ‘Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory’, in Thelma S. Fenster, ed., Arthurian Women (New York, 2000), 97–114. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies:

Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (London, 1990), 75.

(13) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT, 2000), 414–15.

(14) Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun (Oxford, 1996), 100ff.

(15) A Bloody Batell: or the Rebels Overthrow and Protestants victorie (1641, n.p.).

(16) http://www.corvardus.f9.co.uk/religion/wicca/witch1736.htm.

(17) Macbeth is only in the 1623 Folio, which does not render it problem-free.

(18) Jacques Guillemeau, Child-birth, or, The happy deliuerie of women, etc. (London, 1635).

(19) Right hand reliquaries were the most common because the hand mimicked a bishop’s blessing gesture. See Thomas P. F. Hoving, ‘A Newly Discovered Reliquary of St. Thomas Becket’, Gesta, 4 (1965), 28–30.

(20) B. Taylor, ‘The Hand of St James’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 75 (1994–7), 97–102.

(21) A. A. Bromham, ‘The Date of The Witch and the Essex Divorce Case’, Notes and Queries, 225 (1980), 149–52.

(22) Confusingly, there are two characters named ‘Luce’, both intending to marry Robin Chartley, ‘a wild headed gentleman’, as specified in the Dramatis Personae (38).

(23) Gammer Gurton’s Needle (London, 1553).

Diane Purkiss

Diane Purkiss is Fellow and Tutor in English, Keble College, Oxford. Her publications include Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (2005) and The English Civil War: A People's History (2006), and, as co-editor with Clare Brant, Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 (1992).

Print Publication Date: Mar 2013 Subject: History, European History, Early Modern History (1501 to 1700)

Online Publication Date: May 2013

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199578160.013.0009