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Course Description:

This Paracollege Seminar will be an interdisciplinary approach to the complex reality of trials of "witches." "Interdisciplinary," in this case, means that we will be juggling many kinds of questions and many kinds of resources simultaneously. Our first important goal will be to try to understand the trials that took place from the 13th through the 17th centuries, in Europe and America, in which at least 100,000 people (most of them women) were put to death for the practice of "witchcraft." To understand the motivations and assumptions behind these trials we will explore religious ideas about women, heresy, sin, and Satan. We will also employ historians' strategies for understanding the economic and social realities of the communities where trials occurred. And we will study the legal procedures that guided the trials. Our second important goal will be to try to understand the assumptions behind differing interpretations of the witch trials. In particular, we will study and contrast historical interpretations of the trials that do not take special account of the category of gender, with interpretations that consider assumptions about gender in the communities where the trials occurred to be central to any understanding of the trials. Finally, a third important goal will be to cultivate a richer understanding of the ways witches are represented in the present as well as in the periods of the trials. By examining both the historical record, and the contemporary image of witches in popular culture, we will try to understand what a culture does by representing witches in a certain way. We will pursue the notion that beliefs about and representations of witches amount to a "crystallization" of beliefs about and relations of gender. Put another way, we will explore the idea that witch beliefs are a coordinated set of practices and "knowledge" that reveal arrangements of gender and power through the ages.

Course Requirements:

Required Texts:

Photocopied excerpts: (Berger, Boguet, Bordo, Daly, Foucault, Kramer/Sprenger, Miles, et al.)

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