Kathryn Hughes
Women who Denounced their Sisters as Witches
The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations
By Diane Purkiss
Routledge 296pp £14.99
Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic 'foremothers' in the dim murk of the past. The witch was a good place to start. Dunked, splattered and singed throughout the early modern period, she could easily be reclaimed for the sisterhood. Her sexual strangeness, medical know-how and social unacceptability made her ripe for canonisation.
The only problem, says Diane Purkiss, is that it didn't happen like that. Witches were not women who lived thrilling, passionate lives on the edge of village respectability. They were not turned over to the authorities because of their subversive way with camomile leaves. Neither was it their refusal to marry which brought a posse of self-righteous burghers to the door. Rather, they were often mean, grubby and dishonest, the sort of old hag no one wanted as a neighbour.
Purkiss searches the scanty English archives - so often overlooked by witch historians in favour of richer European pickings - for the real story. Witches appeared whenever resources were short which, in the early modern period, was often. A woman borrows a saucepan and fails to return it. A child
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk