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übernational trends: The Witch "She'VThe Historian "He": Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts Elspeth Whitney The European witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of those events, Uke the decline and faU of the Roman Empire, which is so complex and resonant that its historiography has almost become a field in itself. Once dismissed as an inexplicable outbreak of mass hysteria unworthy of serious scholarly attention, the witch-hunt is now more often seen as a central event in the formation of early modern Europe which iUuminates larger social and cultural issues. Since Hugh Trevor-Roper inaugurated contemporary scholarship on the subject in 1967, the hunt has come to provide for many scholars a useful focus for analysis of, among other things, the shifting interactions of high and popular culture, the emergence of the modern state or a more "individualistic" ethos, the expansion of bureaucratic elites and the impact of newly empowered "experts," the magistrate and the priest, on vülage life. Curiously, however, there has been relatively little attention paid as yet to exploring the relationship between the witch-hunts and issues relating to gender, in particular the question of why witches were women. Although discussions of this topic have recently (since the late 1980s) become more common, this area of inquiry and others related to gender and the hunts remain surprisingly undeveloped. In the present essay I would like to examine the current state of scholarship on gender and the hunts and suggest some directions for further work. Gender is dearly central in some way to the witch-hunts. That the vast majority of witches were women has been a commonplace of modem research as much as it was to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology. Whether or not we wish to characterize witch-hunting simply as "woman-hunting," or to emphasize that accused witches were most often a particular type of woman, it remains clear that the witch was seen as inverting not only the natural order in general but specificaUy the image of the "good woman." Yet the questions "why were witches women?" or its converse, "why were women witches?" have received short shrift among historians of the European witch hunts.1 While virtuaUy every other asped of the hunts has been debated, the central element that witches were beUeved to be women, has remained, for most scholars, © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 78 Journal of Women's History Fall unproblematic. ExpUdtly or impUcitly it is assumed that a sort of timeless, "natural" misogyny present in Western culture can adequately explain why the coUective image of the witch was that of an ül-tempered, older woman. Conversely, it is argued that misogyny has been so permanent a charaderistic of Western culture that it cannot be considered the cause of so specific an event as the witch-hunts. Yet leaving the question there in fact does Uttle to explain why women were attacked in this way at this time. Nor does it help to üluminate the specific nature of witch beliefs and witch practices, even paradoxicaUy the oft-repeated observation that some witches were male. The extent to which gender has "faUen out" as a category of analysis among the majority of historians of the witch-hunts is quite startling. Despite the use of sophisticated methodologies borrowed from anthropology , sodology, and folkloric studies, the main lines of interpretation of the hunts have been construded largely outside of work in women's history or gender studies. It is unlikely today to find sudi egregious stereotypical remarks as that of Trevor-Roper, who in 1967 described folk witch beliefs as "the mental rubbish of peasant creduUty and feminine hysteria," or JuUo Caro Baroja's suggestion that "a woman usually becomes a witch after the initial failure of her Ufe as a woman, after frustrated or Ulegitimate love affairs have left her with a sense of impotence or disgrace."2 Nevertheless, the bulk of published research on the European hunts at the present time either ignores gender or, even while taking note of the relevance of women's history and feminist analysis, tends to minimize its...

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