Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Heidi Breuer (review)

In the preface to her work, Heidi Breuer writes about the need to make information accessible to the nonspecialist, inviting general readers to see her work as play, and issuing a call “to enjoy the interpretive act.” Crafting the Witch follows through on this invitation, or promise, making use of a prose style that is at once lively, interesting, and informative. While the lucid prose makes Breuer’s work eminently accessible to a broad range of nonspecialist readers, including students, specialists in literary genre and gender will also no doubt find Crafting the Witch to be interesting as well.

Much like Diane Purkiss’s The Witch in History, Breuer’s book focuses on illuminating the origins of a popular conception of witchcraft, that of the “wicked witch.” Specifically, Breuer mines the pages of Arthurian literature (with some Shakespeare for spice) in order to analyze the trends that led to the green-skinned antagonist of The Wizard of Oz. As such, her work moves chronologically from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the sixteenth with frequent jaunts into the modern period to contextualize her findings.

After her introduction, Chapter 2 begins with Breuer’s analysis of the Arthurian stories written by Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Layamon. Breuer argues for a gender-binary in the effects of magic in these works: prophecy and transformative magic is masculine, while healing and household magic is feminine. The texts work to undermine the threat that masculine power posed to the feudal patriarchy, by condemning those with overdeveloped masculinity. Rather than a mainstay villain, the witch is seen as a positive healing figure, despite her relative marginalization as a rarely used character.

“From Rags to Riches, or The Step-mother’s Revenge” focuses upon two staple tropes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Arthurian literature: the churlish knight and the loathly lady. In regard to the first trope, Breuer focuses on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Greene Knight, The Turke and Sir Gawain, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and The Carle of Carlisle, while the analysis of the latter concentrates on John Gower’s “Tale of Florent,” Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, and The Marriage of Sir Gawain. Here Breuer offers a thought-provoking conclusion: the use of transformative magic in these works, rather than being associated with masculinity, is frequently the province of the now-emerging “wicked witch.” Even more interesting is that this witch is often a stepmother, who reflects anxieties about expanding economic opportunities for women in the time period in question.

Crafting the Witch’s fourth chapter addresses Malory’s Morte Darthur; Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Of primary importance to Breuer’s argument is the treatment of maternity in each work: both Spenser’s condemnation of maternity as grotesque and maternity’s absence from Malory’s and Shakespeare’s works. Breuer ties this preoccupation with maternity once again to the economic changes detailed in the previous chapter. From this preoccupation, two figures emerge: the beautiful temptress (embodying the prematernal) and the crone hag (embodying the postmaternal). These figures represent the potential wielders of this new economic power (that is, unmarried women and widows), and their warped or absent maternity a lack of governing masculine power (through marriage).

Finally, Chapter 5 addresses the prosecution of witches in England. Breuer argues that this prosecution emerges from the maternity-witch tie: if witches are antimothers, then those who are not mothers—or not good enough mothers—are witches. Breuer suggests that the staying power of the wicked witch has nothing to do with her magic. Rather, the gender conflicts created by capitalism continue to feed the wicked witch’s relevance in modernity and thus...