Raiding the Patriarch's Toolbox: Reading Masculine Governance in Cases of Male Witchcraft, 1592-1692

R.W. Connell's term 'hegemonic masculinities' has slipped fairly easily into early modern masculinity studies and is largely accepted as a meaningful description of the practice of masculine governance in early modern English communities.' However, Connell's formulation must be weighed against what scholars of early modern masculinities have identified as the 'instability' of early modern manhood. The power of men. and ideas of patriarchal manhood. 'were unstable categories of early modern thought'. Patriarchy was never 'simply hegemonic, but always contained contradictions, compromises and sources of instability'. This chapter explores some of these instabilities in early modern masculine governance as they are represented in evidence against men accused of witchcraft in England and New England during the seventeenth century. This research suggests that scholars need to pay more attention to the distinction between the ideologies of masculine governance, which certainly asserted hegemonic masculinities, and the actual practice, production, and experience of masculine hegemony by men in everyday life. In particular, this research shows the importance of recognizing that no individual man, or class of men, had a universal claim to either authority or subordination. In its everyday expression, masculine governance was, to use Shepard's term, 'multi-relational'. and consequently it was dynamic and highly situational Masculine governance was, in effect, a set of ideologies that provided a toolbox for early modern Englishmen wherein they found the means to assert, enact, produce, or perform masculine governance, but equally where they might find the means to receive, accept, avoid, undermine, or reject it. The sources for this chapter are the legal records of six cases wherein men were prosecuted for witchcraft in England and New England between 1592 and 1692. In each case there is a significant amount of narrative evidence that describes the characteristics cited by accusers to identify a man as a witch.