Format: Thèse

« This dissertation examines the cultural constructions of the deviant female types of ‘whore’ and ‘witch’ in England from 1560 to 1650. I argue that these women were considered dangerous because they challenged the gender order, threatened the stability of households, and disrupted society, the economy, and the legal order. People who were ‘honest’ defined whores and witches as ‘other’ through association with animals, the devil, dirt, and/or disease. Both whores and witches were also linked to the female deviant type of the ‘scold’ through their aggressive use of language. I argue that although women were ‘other’ to men there was not a sustained crisis in gender relations between 1560 and 1650. The use of language as a tool of social control is also explored, especially the ways in which reputation was manipulated through gossip and defamation. When informal controls were ineffective, legal punishments were also used.

The sources for this study include diaries and letters, and printed works such as ballads, prescriptive literature, and homilies. These are used to establish the ways in which whores and witches were defined within a ‘national culture’ created by educated members of elite groups. Records from the courts of the consistory and High Commission of the diocese of Chester are sampled to study both attitudes toward and language used to describe whores and witches in Cheshire and Lancashire.

The materials from these local courts suggest that attitudes regarding sexual reputation differed from those in Southeastern England. Cases of sexual defamation from the Northwest show that men were concerned with sexual reputation: not as much as northwestern women, but more than men in the Southeast. The cases also reveal that women wielded power in their neighborhoods through participation in oral culture: in the creation and destruction of good reputation (both in the community and in the church courts) and in their perceived ability to access supernatural power through prayer and cursing. A single illicit sexual act did not necessarily ruin a woman’s reputation in Cheshire and Lancashire. Sexual defamation apparently peaked during the same period as the apex of bastard births in the Northwest. » [Résumé]

« The figure of the witch emerging from early modern English and German aesthetic discourse is constructed as a threatening maternal entity. Using the methodology of object-relations theory with its focus on the relations between mother figures and infants, I explore the emotional ramifications of witch production as it occurs in the discourse of specific cultural milieux. My goal is to bring psychology and history together in a study of verbal and visual documents which register early modern German and English society’s concepts of the witch. Object-relations concepts significant for theorists including Klein, Winnicott and Kristeva in the development of the subject inform my study, as does social historical material concerning the witches and concerning the earliest “mothering” experiences of children and parents in early modern Europe.

The dissertation first examines representations of the witch found in treatise illustrations, single-sheet woodcuts (especially the work of Hans Baldung), and excerpts from satire and play literature from late fifteenth and sixteenth-century German regions in the interests of providing a basis for understanding the witch figure as she is presented in three early seventeenth-century English “witch” plays. The German witch appears as an anti-maternal construct which has as its object the undoing of the domestic sphere and the destruction of community. Most prevalent in the German material is the weather witch, a frightening manipulator of the environment who perverts the conventions pertaining to “good enough mothering” as she removes rather than provides nurture.

Three further chapters examine the witch figure in Macbeth, The Witch of Edmonton, and The Lancashire Witches, from which she emerges as an unreliable, ambivalent and aggressive maternal construct. The relationship of the English witch with her demon familiar characterizes her as a perverted mother, but interaction between the witches and fellow players/villagers suggests the latter also play a role in perverting her motherliness. Analysis of the plays reveals the interplay of character and culture and elucidates the role of emotion, particularly fear of and ambivalence toward the maternal entity, in the construction of the historical phenomenon of witch persecution. » [Résumé]