Agency, Women and Witchcraft in Early-Modern England: Rye, 1607-11

In his introduction to 'Languages of Witchcraft', Stuart Clark suggests that witchcraft evidence contained strategies for the telling of persuasive legal stories. An ability to form successful narratives gave power to the narrator, 'often a powerless and inaudible person', While I endorse the idea that witchcraft accusers and confessors could gain power from their narratives, I am not sure it is useful to understand such narrators as 'powerless and inaudible' persons. Within this framework Clark is assuming that such tellers, usually ordinary women, were socially disabled and publicly silent. By doing so Clark is keeping with historians of early-modern English witchcraft. While this historiography produces far more subtle accounts of gender and witchcraft than it did a decade ago, the assumption that patriarchal ideology essentially curtailed women's ability to self-determine is one of the operational suppositions of the field. This literature assumes that early-modern English society was a place where 'women were particularly powerless'. Scholars recognize a female sphere, but one where parameters were 'dictated and maintained by men'. Hence women's access to 'avenues of social power' was 'blocked and limited', and women 'lived within certain definitions of female identity [...] over which they exercised little control'. Witchcraft accusation and confession were fantasies for 'dispossessed people'. While I appreciate the genesis of these accounts, the methodology amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein female subordination is normalized and masculine dominance universalized. Such frameworks mean that, while historians of English witchcraft concede the reality of female power, they do not treat women as self-determining historical actors. Yet masculine dominance was a patriarchal fantasy at best imperfectly realized, as most evident among jurists, theologians, politicians, and the writers of prescriptive literature. The daily reality of gender relations often departed markedly from the imagined ideal. In daily life, 'gendered power' might be measured along multiple axes, not just the dichotomy of male dominance and female subordination. Historians of English witchcraft need to pay greater attention to this, or run the risk of replicating the categories of the past, producing histories that assume, rather than interrogate, masculine dominance.