User:Ssstephen/Reading/Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

Introduction

the relation between witch-hunting and the increasing enclosure of the female body through the extension of state control over women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity

Witchcraft as an accusation often involves control of bodies, demonic possession, etc; the relationship between the myths and the facts is interesting.

In Tanzania alone, it is calculated that more than five thousand women a year are murdered as witches, some macheted to death, others buried or burned alive.

oh fuck

In a grotesque fashion these reproduce the very stereotypes that were created by the witch hunters and led to the deaths of thousands of women.

How can these women be reframed? The healers, the alchemists, the gossipers? Women with intense power unimaginable to those in charge: real social power, esoteric knowledge, community with each other and with nature. Is reframing or reclaiming the right thing to do with unacceptable symbols? In reference to "witchy" tourism and commerce in europe, Federici seems to be arguing here that the symbol of the witch should be erased. In her KABK interview she had a related reservation about the category of witch being taken on by 21st century, and absolutely has a point that this is a symbol which caused and causes suffering and death for thousands of people. But is her vision of the merchants simply taking "the ugly, sadistically laughing old witch, off their shelves" the best way to deal with this problem? She also mentions that the massacres that have happened are not well remembered, and the crimes have not been apologised for, so I wonder if it may be too soon for the image to disappear. Re holocaust memorials, slavery reparations and Global Corporation Taxes can something similar be done. Can linguistic/symbolic reappropriation attempts be as effective as these actions? Maybe and maybe, reappropriation as a form of rebellion and self-definition.

Memorial of witch trials in Vardø, Norway. This involves a commemorative flame in the most terrifying way.

One

Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, eds. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen

Why Speak of the Witch Hunts Again?

forced them to submit to the patriarchal control of the nuclear family

Re: are Deleuze and Guattari just completely insane? What?

the witch hunt stands at a crossroad of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world.

This was in italics in the original so I assumed it was important. But I do agree actually and think it's important.

Magic and magick: the similarities are important and useful but also they are not the same thing. Art has a (magical) power to enlighten and inform in a way that bare fact cannot. Magick is also about hidden, secret or esoteric knowledge. Forms of knowing and telling and learning that are encoded: why are they encoded? What can they do? Encoding can disguise things and also shows that what is encoded was worth the effort of hiding. Encryption is like ornamentation, Marian Bantjes is a cryptographer. None of this paragraph has anything to do with the text or does it?

Should we not, then, confine ourselves to microhistories that programmatically cut off village events from any links with overarching social structures?

If this conversation is to do with globalisation, then scale seems like it should be an explicit concern. The rhetoric in the quote above implies a binary between looking at the local and global, but in fact to fully understand both and make an informed decision we need an excited zooming in and out repeatedly, crash zoom x10 like in an instagram story.

Isn’t a broader underlying cause called for, connecting and explaining all these different correlations?

Not really! There might just be a buch of stuff happening, but I'll play along. Hopefully Silvia is specifically using this word "correlation" to bait us. But I do feel in general this is the weak point of her argument: she is making a really big claim and that makes it very hard to prove, I want to agree so I do but I dont know if her argument is really convincing.

Witch Hunts, Enclosures, and the Demise of Communal Property Relations

There seems to be, however, a peculiar relationship between the dismantling of communitarian regimes and the demonization of members of the affected communities that makes witch-hunting an effective instrument of economic and social privatization.

Enclosures, Britain (and Ireland)'s obsession with land. "Everyman's right" or freedom to roam is still not a thing in Ireland, the farmers are the backbone of our society. Rack rent: "an extortionate or very high rent, especially an annual rent equivalent to the full value of the property to which it relates". This is some John B Keane shit.

That it was not only the lords but the well-to-do among the peasants who raised the edges (the common form of boundary marking) intensified the hostilities the enclosures produced, as the enclosers and the enclosed knew each other, walked the same paths, and were connected by multiple relations, and the fear that consumed them was fueled by the proximity of their lives and the possibility of retaliation.

If the bad guys were clearly defined we would have eaten them by now.

Older women were most affected by these developments.

Combination of age and gender restrictions: how did it affect older men, younger women? The stereotype of the old female witch seems to be correct from how Federici is describing those affected here, but it would be interesting to expand this to a more full picture. Also the earlier accusations of witch craft, I dont have a reference but I seem to remember a more even gender balance, in particular targeting of politicians? Need to double check.

Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas (bad link)

Charter of the Forest is mentioned alongside the Magna Carta as a legal document protecting the rights of widows. Were these documents really used or even imagined the way we picture them now?

Not surprisingly, many so-called witches were poor women

Poor to add to the characteristics of female and elderly (I mean obviously, but just making a note). Although maybe not that obvious because this really confirms that these women were very different from the rich, powerful men accused of witchcraft in earlier times.

at least one-third of the charges recorded by C. L’Estrange Ewen relative to the Home Circuit for the period between 1563 and 1603 were for bewitchment of pigs, cows, horses, geldings, and mares, several to death

The witch is allegedly trying to seize control or power, or at least destroy the power and possessions of others.

women participated in many protests, pulling up the fences that now surrounded the commons. In the witch the authorities simultaneously punished the attack on private property, social insubordination, the propagation of magical beliefs, which presumed the presence of powers they could not control, and the deviation from the sexual norm that now placed sexual behavior and procreation under the rule of the state.

In this sense, we have to think of the enclosures as a broader phenomenon than simply the fencing off of land. We must think of an enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people and nature.

By the seventeenth century a drastic change was underway, reflected in Descartes’s theory that animals are nonsentient machines. Having companion animals was increasingly treated with suspicion

Really? This makes me think of werewolves also. The reference Federici gives for this paragraph has some really interesting things about trials of a witch, vampire and werewolf, as well as trials of exhumed bodies and bones. Even the 400 year old bones of Thomas à Becket, after being worshiped a s a holy relic, were tried as a traitor by Henry VIII then burned and scattered in the wind.

Witch-Hunting and the Fear of the Power of Women

In europe the first witch (Alice Kyteler 1324?) and the last witch (Helen Duncan 1944?) would be interesting stories to follow and compare.

This involved a historic battle against anything posing a limit to the full exploitation of the laborer, starting with the web of relations that tied the individuals to the natural world, to other people, and to their own bodies. Key to this process was the destruction of the magical conception of the body that had prevailed in the Middle Ages

The magical person, the shaman, the world spirit manifest in the human, vs the beast as nonsentient machine, the brain as computer. Rational and emotional thinking in conflict with each other, separation from nature. Is this in conflict with my eternal struggle against dualism? Not really, it is still possible for everything to be one and for emotion and magic to be part of that one. Just because its magic doesnt mean its supernatural (or extranatural).

precapitalist

Bad word.

Love is the great magician, the demon that unites earth and sky and makes humans so round, so whole in their being, that once united they cannot be defeated.

Maybe a paraphrase from Plato's Symposium. Love as daimon or spirit.

In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.

How does this translate into modern day capitalism and modern day sexuality? On one side we say we have sexual liberation but on the other side we say we have more repressive and all encompassing forms of capitalism, how do they make sense together?

the courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice who managed to contract marriages with noblemen but were then accused of being witches.

Did capitalism enable social climbing, or did it already exist? If so were these sorts of accusations made in other times? Or did it exist and was accepted?

Then a scary paragraph about torture and public humiliation.

Women were terrorized through fantastic accusations, horrendous torture, and public executions because their social power had to be destroyed

The exaggeration of ‘crimes’ to mythical proportions so as to justify horrendous punishments is an effective means to terrorize a whole society, isolate the victims, discourage resistance, and make masses of people afraid to engage in practices that until then were considered normal.

In relation to McCarthy era anti-commmunism, and the war on terror. What is it that the "terrorists" of the middle east were/are threatening the west with that was so terrifying for them? We are kind of encouraged that it was an excuse to steal oil, but was there something ideological happening as well, a class struggle, an uprising?

On the Meaning of ‘Gossip’

Woo feminist etymological critique time! Honestly one of my favourite times.

a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk, that is, talk potentially sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates

Attaching a denigrating meaning to the term indicating friendship among women served to destroy the female sociality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages

These two quotes from the first paragraph sum this up pretty neatly, and I think this idea in general works well as a small symbolic idea, so you could just read this and stop. Idea as symbol is really fun, if it is possible for ideas to be symbols can ideas be self referencial symbols? Like the phrase "this word" or actually more like the idea of you (personally) thinking. What about ideas with feedback loops like the idea of you thinking about self referencial symbol-ideas. Anyway, distracting.

They were critical of strong, independent women, and especially of their relations to their husbands, to whom—the accusation went—they preferred their friends.

Oh noooo poor boys the world doesnt revolve around them.

“The tavern,” Wright points out, “was the resort of women of the middle and lower orders who assembled there to drink and gossip.”

Quote from A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages, Thomas Wright. The "gossips" are presented in a negative light but even with the more modern meaning of the word the behaviour being described sounds very subjectively bad in the time period, and actually the same behaviour (with the same word?) could still be interpreted as positive, female friendship. Obviously this isnt the way that history played out at the time unfortunately, and the practice of women meeting socially became less acceptable and the word more negative. This is maybe an important detail of how words and norms can subtly shift. Was everyone aware of the shifting perception, was anyone aware of it?

In Italy in the fourteenth century they could still go independently to court to denounce a man if he assaulted or molested them.<pre>

Amazing, this is still barely possible today (in some places). The link between social isolation and loss of power (to and far past the point of abuse) seems really obvious, without social connection and solidarity it is much harder to defend rights. Is this social connection available today? In public spaces, the difference between ghetto-ising and allowing spaces for groups to share common concerns is important but maybe harder to understand in digital public spaces. The difference between being included in a unified public space (with questionable freedom of speech), and having a social space where you can voice your concerns safely and where they will be heard. 

<pre>scold’s bridle or gossip's bridle

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh terrifying. Also clear links with slavery where the same torture equuipment was used. Eeeugggh really horrifying.

Even when used with the older meaning it displayed new connotations

This, as before relationship of what the word symbolises and how the signified is percieved.

In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory... They are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms—concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behavior

Federici seems to be idolising the link between these behaviours and women, and I feel like she is suggesting a return to these sorts of gender roles? Definitely I see the reason to re-empower women and revive the important practices (for example here knowledge sharing) that were lost, but at some point reinstating the gender divide and roles that existed in Europe before capitalism, or that exist outside of capitalism, seems like a bad plan. Just because its not capitalism doesnt mean its good. What does it mean to revive female practices that were repressed in a multigender, post-binary world, surely they need to be broken apart, scavenged, reformed.

But we are regaining our knowledge. As a woman recently put it in a meeting on the meaning of witchcraft, the magic is: “We know that we know.”

xoxo gossip girl