Customer Reviews

Male Witches in Early Modern Europe

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Having heard one too many rants about how witch hunting = women hunting, it's nice to find a book on the "witch craze" that is willing to look at the other 25% of accused witches. This book does not really present any new cases of witchcraft for study, but rather takes another look at old ones. The main argument of the book is as follows: through various excuses, modern scholars tend to either ignore or discount Early Modern belief in male witches, and that this is wrong because that presents only one side of the gender equation (which therefore presents a distorted view of the roles of gender). Hence, most of the book is taken up discussing other scholars' views of male witches. If people come to this book expecting to find lists and categories of male witches, therefore, they will probably be sorely disappointed.

I personally found this book quite interesting because it attempts to account for **why** such a large percent of accused witches were male, despite that Early Moderns associated witchcraft with feminity. The authors come up with a plausible answer: that the Early Modern view of gender was not so rigid as it may seem, but rather allowed for hierarchies within genders. Hence male witches could exist within the concept of "feminine" witch

I've been doing a lot of reading about the history of European witchcraft lately. I've been impressed with the seriousness with which the topic is now being treated. I did not perceive any dearth of attention to male witches in the recent scholarship, but I thought it would be interesting to read more in depth on it and so bought this book.

However, rather than being a history, this book is a rant about contemporary scholarship of the history of witchcraft. The gist of the criticism is that there are way too many people bringing a feminist perspective to the field. Pages and pages are given over to all sorts of "proofs" of this feminazi neglect and yes, PREJUDICE against white men, I mean, the subject of male witches in the scholarship of the history of witchcraft. The actual history of male witches in early modern Europe is an excuse for the real topic of complaint about the state of the field.

Thus, this book breaks faith with the reader. It presents itself as a history book. It is in fact a rant against feminists in academia.

If the authors believe that the alleged neglect of the subject of male witches in the scholarship of the history of witchcraft is a fit topic, then perhaps they should raise it at conferences on the subject. Don't waste our time and money with it, and especially don't try to market your rant by calling it scholarship or history. It isn't.

I was once a professor, and this sort of crying and whining with footnotes is one of the reasons I got out of it. The only thing readers will learn from this book is that there are some people who are willing to waste great gobs of their time - and yours - being affronted.