Anthropos: Anthropos, 99.2004

Anthropos, 99.2004

Bibliographische Daten

Zeitschrift

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschrift

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

Persistenter Identifier:: BV043334262

Titel:: Anthropos

Erscheinungsort:: Fribourg

Verlag:: Ed. St. Paul

Erscheinungsjahr:: 1906

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Wissensgebiet:: Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie > Allgemeines

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenband

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711752

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711752

Persistenter Identifier:: 1510222436589

Titel:: Anthropos, 99.2004

Erscheinungsjahr:: 2004

Signatur:: LA 1118

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Zeitschriftenheft

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenheft

Titel:: Bd. 99, 2004, Heft 2

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Zeitschriftenrezension

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenrezension

Titel:: Rezensionen

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Anthropos 99.2004 Rezensionen Apps, Lara, and Andrew Gow: Male Witches in Early Modem Europe. Manchester; Manchester Univer sity Press, 2003. 190 pp. ISBN 0-7190-5708-6. Price: £ 12.99 This is a useful book valuable in calling attention to certain current distortions and omissions that have disfigured some of the historical studies of witchcraft in recent years. It is divided into an introduction putting forward the authors’ aims, five expositional chapters, and a brief conclusion, as well as an appendix presenting extracts from Johannes Junius’s famous account of his torture and forced confession of witchcraft in Bamberg in 1628. It is complemented by copious footnotes and a useful bibliography. The authors review much recent historical literature on witchcraft in Europe asking why male witches have been unduly ignored, even though their existence in case materials is usually briefly acknowledged. The works of Stuart Clark, Lyndal Roper, and Anne Barstow are especially criticized. The authors note that while about 75% of the cases of witchcraft in Europe involve wom en, some men were nearly always also accused and executed in most areas and that at some times and Places in Europe the majority of persons accused were actually men and not women. They rightly ask why the current literature so often underplays men and wonder how any interpretation of witchcraft that ignores men, even though they might be a minority, can be valid. They conclude that “ideas about witches and especial ly learned witchcraft theory, and witch-hunting were gender-inclusive and any scholar who purports to take witches as his or her primary subject would do well to remember this.” They go on to conclude “that there was no conceptual barrier to male witches in any period of Ihe witch-hunting era” (155). They note that “our work 18 opposed to women’s history, or rather, a particular l ype of women’s history exemplified by Anne Barstow’s book Witchcraze” (157). Their point is that in some feminist historians’ zeal to recount the long oppression °f women by men, some contemporary historians have °verstated or even distorted the history of this topic. “In ° r der to be meaningful, our interpretative frameworks have to be just as capable of accommodating the atypical e *periences as they are of accommodating the typical” (59 f.). The authors devote considerable time trying to de termine just what recorded confessions by suspected witches may actually signify about what they themselves thought. Unfortunately, they spend far less time exam ining the terms by which these women were accused, an interesting and complex issue since many of these wom en were accused by women. Confessions were mostly gained under torture or threat of it so that we cannot always trust what these accounts say about the actual beliefs of these accused. Indeed, these confessions were usually recorded by the prosecutors themselves, whereas the accused persons were often illiterate and ignorant of scholarly theory about witches; consequently, even these accounts are tricky. For these and other reasons, this section is marred by considerable supposition and speculation. The authors present striking quantitative materi al showing that in all of the most famous theo retical instructional manuals about witchcraft, such as Nider’s “Formicarius,” Institoris’s and Sprenger’s “Malleus maleficarum,” de Lancre’s “Tableau de LTn- constance des sorcier,” terms for both male and female witches frequently appear and that in some of these works the references to male witches are nearly as frequent or even more frequent than are the terms for female witches. In the final and most analytically searching chapter the authors put forward a series of questions about how future scholarly studies might investigate the ways earlier Europeans envisioned witches and witchcraft and whether those ideas led either to any inhibition toward suspecting or accusing men and whether those men who were thought to be witches were considered feminised. They point out how many of the witchcraft persecu tions also involved accusations of heresy, noting that there was certainly no factor of gender at work there. They also point out how witchcraft was increasingly associated with the practice of magic and go on to note that so far historical research has not provided any clear-cut associations between magic and gender, though some forms of magic do appear in some places and at some times to be more associated with one sex or the other. They conclude: “Male witches were not depicted explicitly as feminine; however, they were associated with certain traits that feminised them implicitly” (127). They go on to pursue Stuart Clark’s argument that much European thought (and for that matter all thought everywhere) was polarized into dichotomies that were often associated explicitly or implicitly with gender (see

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