Turning Off The Witch

In this essay I want to demonstrate how the methodological frameworks historians use to understand the early modern past might act to silence the very voices we most want to hear. I suggest that methodologies informed by polarities between empowered masculine speakers versus silenced female subjects are inherently deaf to the echoes of female mastery which might haunt the patriarch's tale. My subject is a case of witchcraft from seventeenth-century England: in 1653 Edmond Bower published an account of the death of Anne Bodenham, the elderly wife of Edward Bodenham of Fisherton Anger, who was executed for witchcraft and poisoning at Salisbury in late March or early April of that year.