:Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

Abstract

Lyndal Roper's Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (1994) redirected the study of early modern sexuality and witchcraft. It brilliantly criticized dominant approaches to subjectivity, claiming that historians still reduced individuals to specimens of historical mentalités defined by intellectual history and politics. Gender, reduced to linguistic or ritual constructs, could only help write the history of discourse about the body. True historiography of the body required respecting its preconscious “givenness” (p. 17). Roper approached early modern corporeality through two then-controversial methods, Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis and the study of accused witches' confessions. Despite torture, these stereotypical narratives expressed individuals' “own condensations of shared cultural preoccupations” (p. 20). Oedipus and the Devil examined witch persecution as one aspect of gender history. This new book fulfills Roper's implied promise to study German witchcraft ca. 1560–1760 through “a detailed compilation of social factors, and an exploration of the relation between judicial process and political power” (p. 26). It is written for both witchcraft scholars and non-specialists. Roper expands her trials database and research on individuals and localities to produce a fascinating study “deeply influenced by psychoanalytic ideas” yet constituting “a historical, not a psychoanalytic study” (p. x). As previously, Roper contends that core anxieties behind witch persecution “turned on motherhood, the bodies of ageing women, and fertility” (p. 7). The book has four sections: “Persecution,” “Fantasy,” “Womanhood,” and “The Witch.” “Persecution” and “Fantasy” examine familiar themes such as interrogation and torture, cannibalism, and witches' sabbaths in largely conventional terms. “Womanhood” and “The Witch” develop Roper's own theses: reproduction and infantile fixation on the mother as core anxieties; menopausal women as stereotypical witches; shifting anxiety after 1650, from fertility and maternity to sexuality and childhood, paralleling the decline in persecution.