EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde29 Jan

Where does the "witch" come from ? | Anthony Bale

The witch comes out of a deeply misogynistic, deeply anti-feminist ideology of the Middle Ages and is very much connected to violence against women and the erasure of women.

About Anthony Bale "I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then led me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media."

Key Points • The story of Alice Kyteler and the witchcraft allegation of 1324 helped crystallize the church's new view that magic was heresy, and it shaped the later stereotype of the witch. • The trial is not simply a story set in Ireland but one about how the church at a particular place and time invented its enemies. • The record alleges secret gatherings, diabolical pacts and harmful magic; Alice escaped, but one of her co-accused was burned at a period that coincides with the festival of Halloween. • Witchcraft accusations flourish in stressed communities and spread through rumor or gossip, causing real harm. Modern portrayals often sanitize the witch, despite misogynist origins connected to violence against women and their erasure.

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