The Witch in the Western Imagination - Lyndal Roper
Published in 2012 by The University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA
240 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3297-2 (cloth:alk. paper)
LCCN: NX652.W58R67 2012
When we think of a stereotypical, pop-culture representation of a witch, we typically conjure up images of old, ugly hags wearing pointed hats, riding on broomsticks, and brewing potions in their black cauldrons. These are the witches of common children’s literature, and this popular image pervades many of our pop culture representations of a witch. This image has become a widespread and highly-marketable icon, helping to sell postcards, books, and even adorning the patch worn by the members of the town of Salem’s police department. As such, this witchy figure shows up most commonly during the Halloween season, adorning various Halloween decorations, mugs, and T-shirts. These witchy figures have served as popular villains in television shows, movies, and video games (enter one of my favorite fictional witches, the always-rhyming Gruntilda.)
Yet, the history of witchcraft in the Western world has been much less whimsical and family-friendly. While suspicions and accusations of witchcraft have existed since the ancient world, the persecution of supposed witches skyrocketed in Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. While they occurred throughout much of early modern Europe, there was an enormous spike in witchcraft trials and executions in southwest Germany in the late 16th century. An era dominated by religious schisms, civil wars, and economic strife, the late 16th and early 17th centuries were witness to a second great witch craze in Western Europe, resulting in the death of 40,000-60,000 people (roughly 80% of which were women).
Scholarly interest in the early modern witch trials renewed in the 1970s, as the phenomenon of witchcraft accusations and trials were analyzed under the critical lenses of feminist theory, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, criminology, literary criticism, and philosophy. In her 2012 book, The Witch in the Western Imagination, Australian historian and Regius Professor of History at Oxford University Lyndal Roper examines various representations of the witch throughout sixteenth and seventeenth-century Germany. Instead of focusing on witchcraft trials and the communities that bore them, Roper, utilizing psychoanalytic theory, focuses on how the image of the witch changed throughout this period, and how these changing representations of the female body reflect the mental worlds of early modern Germany.
Overview:
Composed of a series of previously published essays, The Witch in the Western Imagination employs a wide array of material culture (art, literature, archival materials) and case studies to investigate how the popular image of the witch transformed within sixteenth and seventeenth-century Germany. While loosely connected, these essays can be divided into three sections: the first three chapters address the complex and multifaceted representations of witches, the fourth chapter on the nature of emotions and the connection of envy to witchcraft, and the final three chapters which examine various case studies of late witchcraft persecutions through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.
As such, the first chapter examines the role of demonological literature within early modern Europe, as it slowly transformed from a genre of Christian moralizing and warning to one of entertainment. Instead of concerning itself purely with theology and metaphysics, demonological literature, Roper argues, granted writers the freedom to play with various taboos within a Christian context as they produced literature that excited and entertained readers with their taboo (and oftentimes erotic) content.
In the second chapter, Roper examines various female figures within the history of Augsburg. These figures can be found in the mythical origin tales of the city and they adorn the city’s architecture. With these witch-like figures so integral to the history of the city, Roper argues that these ambivalent (but not hostile) attitudes toward the witch might help explain why there were relatively few witchcraft trials in Augsburg.
In chapter three, Roper zooms in and examines a singular picture frame crafted by Albrecht Dürer. Witches occupy the border of this frame, and while some of them are old hags with sagging breasts, others are young and virile. Roper argues that the representations presented in these images show a particular obsession with reproduction within the woman’s body, reflecting particular fears regarding fertility, sterility, aging, and death.
Occupying the midpoint of the book, chapter four anchors the text by drawing forth Roper’s central thesis: witchcraft is centered around the emotion of envy. Roper begins the chapter by arguing that, within the field of historical inquiry, a history of emotions can serve as a way to both overcome some of the deadlocks between social construction and physiology. Roper examines the role of envy in creating a tension between fertile young women and older women who can no longer bear children. She argues that the image of the witch shares much with the images of envy in classical literature (snakes in hair, shriveled breasts, etc). Utilizing the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, Roper writes,
What happened was not that the old woman felt envious, and then destroyed her neighbors’ cattle and crops or made their children die: rather, her neighbors feared envious attacks, identified the witch as the cause of misfortune, and then drove that person to her death. Murderous aggression originated not in the witch herself, but in those who accused her. It was not envy itself but the identification of someone else as envious which provided the emotional fuel of the witch craze. (113)
Roper then goes on to connect the emotion of envy with the oral phase of development and the bond with the mother figure, pointing out that much of witchcraft literature is likewise fixated on oral fantasies (witches offer their victims food or drinks that are poisoned, the witch steals milk or causes other mothers’ milk to dry up, etc). Since, according to Roper, “emotions can cause social action” (116), she ultimately argues that by examining the dominant emotions of a particular period, we can better understand their events.
In chapter five, Roper contrasts a satirical play about rural village life by Sebastian Sailer (1714-1771) to the real-life witchcraft trial and death of Magdalena Bollman in 1747 (which is a relatively late date for a witchcraft trial). By examining these two documents side by side, Roper presents two distinct depictions of rural life in eighteenth-century Germany. In chapter six, Roper focuses on the role of children’s imaginations in the shifting image of the witch. In a time when children’s testimony began to be taken seriously, their accounts deviated from the standard demonological texts about witchcraft and instead incorporated a litany of sexual and animal phobias, themes from children’s games, and myth and fairy tales (154-155). Roper argues that while the involvement of children in witchcraft is a grim reality, it also provides us a valuable window into the mental worlds of seventeenth-century children. These childish descriptions of wands, mice, demons, and witches became a form of entertainment in the late seventeenth century, and thus found itself cemented in the 19th-century folklore tradition (which sought to recover the traditional stories of the peasantry in the wake of the Industrial Revolution).
Finally, in chapter seven, Roper compares two case studies: Veit the Tailor, an eighteen-year-old student and thief who, in an intentionally suicidal decision, claimed to have made a pact with the Devil in 1680, and the painter Christoph Haizmann, whom Freud diagnosed nearly two centuries later in his “A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis.” Roper uses these examples to highlight the advantages that psychoanalysis possesses for examining the inner lives of historical actors, as well as its limitations. She also explores how Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation affected the subjectivity of those who lived through it, as well as the challenges for a historian who utilizes psychoanalysis (175).
Commendations:
The Witch in the Western Imagination is a dynamic, insightful analysis of how the image of the witch transformed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as a psychoanalytic reading of these images. Many historians of early modern witchcraft have sought to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch trials through gender, class, and political lenses. Roper’s salient critique brings the world of the unconscious to this discourse, as her psychoanalytic approach allows us to explore the roles of fantasy, repression, and emotion as primary motivators, driving people to act in idiosyncratic ways.
Roper, in her psychoanalytically-informed microhistory, attempts to overcome not only the shortcomings of both the linguistic turn and the historical anthropological approaches within early modern studies. She does well to look beyond the standard readings of common sources (indeed, there is an overwhelmingly overstated emphasis on the importance of the Malleus Maleficarum within much of the field of witchcraft studies), as Roper examines other artifacts of the era, ranging from ones that inhabit the more mundane aspects of life to the high art of the time. While these essays have been previously published, Roper does a commendable job in connecting them as she examines the changing attitudes and depictions of witchcraft in Germany. As someone who also utilizes psychoanalysis as a primary interpretive lens, I deeply appreciated Roper’s psychoanalytic intervention within the field of witchcraft studies.
Roper utilizes an impressively wide array of art and literature in early modern Germany as she examines the role of fantasy in constructing the figure of the witch. She also aptly comments on the contemporary debates within the historical method and, with tact and nuance, adds a robust history of emotions as a helpful corrective within the field. By examining the history of emotions within the field of witchcraft studies, Roper manages to make a nuanced argument that goes beyond many overly-simplified, reductionist views of witchcraft that are all too common (both outside and within academia). Rather than a figure with a singular meaning, Roper emphasizes the ambiguity of the witch, as well as how the role of fantasy is key to understanding how they fulfilled various social, emotional, and psychological purposes.
Roper, in focusing on visual culture, presents her research alongside an impressive collection of photographs and illustrations, which aid the reader in understanding her descriptions. Whether they are replications of paintings, picture frames, or marginalia, these images bolster Roper’s argument, making it all the more salient and relatable to the reader. By focusing on the imagery associated with the figure of the witch in this hyper-specific time and place, Roper adds a much-needed dimension to the academic literature on early modern European witchcraft. The combination of her history of emotions within a psychoanalytic framework makes for a unique and essential investigation into the mental worlds of early modern historical agents and helps explain why they acted in particular ways.
Critique:
On the other hand, while Roper’s work is tightly-argued and ultra-specific in focus, this narrow scope will most likely alienate all but the most invested of readers. Roper’s sources are exclusively focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century German iconography and how these images invariably shaped the image of the witch in the popular imagination. As such, while it is no doubt a rewarding and worthwhile read, it is also a deeply academic text. The book consists of a series of previously published academic articles that, while all connected thematically to the changing image of the witch, are only loosely related to one another. This lack of a central argument and the dense prose of many chapters will most likely be difficult for the average reader. Those who are interested in a wider view of how the image of the witch transformed through the popular imagination will most likely be frustrated by the narrow focus of sixteenth and seventeenth-century German literature.
Another issue comes with the difficulty of the psychoanalytic approach in analyzing early modern individuals and attempting to glimpse their subjectivity; I know this difficulty personally, since approaching history through a psychoanalytic lens is a key part of my research and studies as well. Due to the paucity of evidence, it can become difficult to get a full understanding and picture of the psychic life of pre-Enlightenment individuals, let alone how these subjectivities impacted the larger society. Yet, the information that we can glean from these artifacts, while incredibly valuable, can often be misleading, as these documents, artworks, and case studies must, by necessity, occupy the realm of the Symbolic. Roper claims that the discourses on witchcraft have been overemphasized to the detriment of examining how it was practiced, yet there’s no consideration of how such discourses inform the practices (particularly missing is a robust examination of religious discourses of the period). While we can use psychoanalytic theory as a heuristic tool to examine the role of fantasy in covering over the Real by connecting the Symbolic chain of signifiers, it is incredibly difficult to ascribe unconscious motivations to historical actors without resorting to an oversimplified projection.
As an example, Roper emphasizes the primary role of envy in the changing figure of the witch. While making comparisons between envy and witchcraft within religious and classical iconography is useful, it becomes much more tricky when envy is thus utilized as a reductionistic source of the witch figure, as when Roper writes “the witch, after all, is an embodiment of an emotion: envy” (91). This is a bit too far of a reach, as it ignores how other emotions are fully present within representations of the witch (ie. disgust, anger, fear, awe, attraction, etc). To be fair, Roper would undoubtedly agree that the figure of the witch is deeply multifaceted and ridden with contradictions. Yet, at times, she can also ascribe a singular emotion to the emotional charge behind the figure of the witch (namely, envy), which, while indeed powerful, is only one aspect of the full picture. Even if her conclusions are occasionally stretched and her scope is highly-limited, Roper’s psychoanalytic microhistory is still incredibly useful and she opens up new avenues for historical inquiry.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Witch in the Western Imagination is a fascinating, if narrowly-focused, examination of the changing figure of the witch in sixteenth and seventeenth-century southern Germany. While its limited scope and dense text will most likely not appeal to non-specialists, Roper’s intervention is still an interesting and necessary corrective within the field of witchcraft studies. Her psychoanalytic approach within the field of history gives a unique blueprint to follow, allowing students and fellow historians to engage with the historical events of early modern witchcraft in new and innovative ways.