By Diane Purkiss
'Diane Purkiss ... insists on taking witches heavily. Her refusal to write down witch-believers off as unenlightened has produced a few richly clever meditations on their -- and our -- world.' - The Observer'An invigorating and difficult publication ... units many hares running.' - the days better schooling complement
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Additional info for The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations
Sample text
In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Lolly Willowes, Lolly is a shy spinster-aunt, disregarded by the women of her family. But when she buys a cottage in the Chilterns, Lolly discovers that everyone in the village regards her as a witch, and from this comes a new, and much more powerful identity. 40 In a much more complex and anxious way, Sara Maitland’s story ‘The Burning Times’ dramatises the witch as a figure of all that women want to be. The story is narrated by the daughter of a woman denounced as a witch and burned, and it gradually emerges that it is the narrator herself who has given evidence against her mother.
Just what might seem to constitute ‘strength’ and ‘authority’ for an exhausted working mother? Might there be times when she wants to acknowledge aspects of herself which are not maternal? If she is already a mother, what kind of mother goddess does she need? One who mothers her? What about cultures in which maternity has different meanings? The myth of the Goddess, with its insistence on an identity grounded in the maternal body, betrays its origins in male fantasy. Although modern witches claim to be recovering a pure matriarchal vision from the remote past, such a claim cannot really be sustained once their borrowings from more recent texts and discourses have been traced.
If she is already a mother, what kind of mother goddess does she need? One who mothers her? What about cultures in which maternity has different meanings? The myth of the Goddess, with its insistence on an identity grounded in the maternal body, betrays its origins in male fantasy. Although modern witches claim to be recovering a pure matriarchal vision from the remote past, such a claim cannot really be sustained once their borrowings from more recent texts and discourses have been traced. We must begin with Rousseau.