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to Women's Studies Home Page Abstract of a talk by Dr. Allison P. Coudert, Arizona State University,
to be delivered at UAH, Thursday, September 4, 11:10 a.m., Morton Hall, Room 200
The fact that the most intense period of witch hunting occurred during the height of the so-called scientific revolution, between 1570 and 1680, requires an explanation and illustrates the centrality of gender issues at the time. Unlike Stuart Clarke who has argued that it is “a question mal posé to ask why women were the main objects of witch persecutions,” it seems to me that this is and always has been the crucial question. Clark dismisses it as tautological on the grounds that the polarity between the genders was so firmly in place during the period of the witch hunts, that witches were by definition women, and demonologists had “no choice” but to define them as such. It is certainly true that a polarized view of the sexes was a part of Europe’s inheritance from classical sources, particularly Aristotle; but it was only in the early modern period that this polarity became firmly entrenched in learned discourse.
I will argue that Clark has the argument backwards. Rather than accepting the identity of woman and witch as unproblematic, what needs to been shown is, first, why witchcraft emerged as such a threatening possibility in the early modern period and, then, how the emerging definition of a bad women dovetailed with the emerging image of the witch. Furthermore, witch hunting not an anomalous aspect of the scientific revolution but an integral part of it.
Note: the lecture will be pitched for a general audience.