Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Marks, Susan

Area of Concentration

Humanities

Abstract

Upon discovering the medieval text, Malleus Maleficarum , a witchcraft treatise written by Heinrich Kramer in 1485, I found that a witch is not characterized by broomstick-flying or concoction-brewing. The methodology Kramer utilizes for his witch hunt mirrors the new inquisitional structure of the sacrament of confession introduced at the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215, which came to be utilized in the early Christian church to keep heresy in check by monitoring church-goers’ devotion to God. What the Malleus Maleficarum revealed to me about witches and their “craft” lies in the necessary nature of the witch as an un-trustable woman, her alleged tendency towards corruption due to the composition of her body, and her particular autonomy in the act of sex. In this way, the subordinate status attributed to women also placed her at stake as an accused heretic. I found that what constitutes the image of a witch relies on much more than a broomstick and a curio cabinet filled with toxic concoctions. And while I turned to scholarship on possible motivations for evil and feminine spirituality in the middle ages, what I have now added to the scholarship is the necessity of the witch to be a woman.

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