Crafting the Witch Studies in Medieval History and Culture FRANCIS G

Crafting the Witch Studies in Medieval History and Culture FRANCIS G. GENTRY, General Editor Fair and Varied Forms Pestilence in Medieval and Early Visual Textuality in Medieval Modern English Literature Illustrated Manuscripts Bryon Lee Grigsby Mary C. Olson Race and Ethnicity in The Contested Theological Authority Anglo-Saxon Literature of Thomas Aquinas Stephen J. Harris The Controversies between Hervaeus Natalis and Durandis of St. Pourçain Aspects of Love in John Gower’s Elizabeth Lowe Confessio Amantis Ellen Shaw Bakalian Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100–1389 The Medieval Tradition of Thebes Dawn Marie Hayes History and Narrative in the OF Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Women of the Humiliati and Lydgate A Lay Religious Order in Dominique Battles Medieval Civic Life Sally Mayall Brasher Worlds Made Flesh Reading Medieval Manuscript Culture Consuming Passions Lauryn S. Mayer The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Empowering Collaborations Merrall Llewelyn Price Writing Partnerships between Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages Literary Hybrids Kimberly M. Benedict Crossdressing, Shapeshifting, and Indeterminacy in Medieval and The Water Supply System of Modern French Narrative Siena, Italy Erika E. Hess The Medieval Roots of the Modern Networked City The King’s Two Maps Michael P. Kucher Cartography and Culture in Thirteenth-Century England The Epistemology of the Monstrous Daniel Birkholz in the Middle Ages Lisa Verner Desiring Truth “She, This in Blak” The Process of Judgment in Vision, Truth, and Will in Geoffrey Fourteenth-Century Art and Literature Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Jeremy Lowe T. E. Hill The Preaching Fox Through the Daemon’s Gate Festive Subversion in the Plays Kepler’s Somnium, Medieval Dream of the Wakefi eld Master Narratives, and the Polysemy of Warren Edminster Allegorical Motifs Dean Swinford Non-Native Sources for the Scandinavian Kings’ Sagas Confl ict and Compromise in the Paul A. White Late Medieval Countryside Lords and Peasants in Durham, Kingship, Conquest, and Patria 1349–1400 Literary and Cultural Identities in Peter L. Larson Medieval French and Welsh Arthurian Romance Illuminating the Borders of Kristen Lee Over Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 1270–1310 Saracens and the Making of Elizabeth Moore Hunt English Identity The Auchinleck Manuscript Speculative Grammar and Stoic Siobhain Bly Calkin Language Theory in Medieval Allegorical Narrative Traveling through Text From Prudentius to Alan of Lille Message and Method in Late Jeffrey Bardzell Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts Elka Weber Crafting the Witch Gendering Magic in Medieval and Between Courtly Literature and Early Modern England Al-Andalus Heidi Breuer Matière d’Orient and the Importance of Spain in the Romances of the Twelfth- Century Writer Chrétien de Troyes Michelle Reichert Maps and Monsters in Medieval England Asa Simon Mittman Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine Victoria Sweet Crafting the Witch Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England Heidi Breuer New York London First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf- ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Breuer, Heidi, 1972- Crafting the witch : gendering magic in medieval and early modern England / by Heidi Breuer. p. cm.—(Studies in medieval history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 2. English literature—History and criticism. 3. Witches in literature. 4. Arthurian romances—History and criticism. 5. Older women in literature. 6. Magic—England—History. 7. Magic in literature. 8. Witchcraft—England—History. 9. Witches in motion pictures. I. Title. PN671.B73 2009 820'.9377—dc22 2008050963 ISBN 0-203-87678-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-97761-4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87678-4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-97761-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87678-7 (ebk) Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi 1 “Are You a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?”: An Introduction to Medieval and Early Modern Magic 1 2 Gender-Blending: Transformative Power in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Literature 13 3 From Rags to Riches, Or the Step-Mother’s Revenge: Transformative Power in Late Medieval Arthurian Romances 52 4 The Lady is a Hag: Three Writers and the Transformation of Magic in Sixteenth-Century England 96 5 Hags on Film: Contemporary Echoes of the Early Modern Wicked Witch 137 Notes 163 Bibliography 175 Index 187 Preface I suppose every writer feels that the writing is never done; there’s always one more idea, one more thing to say, one more source to footnote. At some point, we must let go, offer our creations to the world, even if we know there’s probably one more thing we could do. We have to take the risk. Every time writers publish their ideas, they take risks—they expose themselves to criticism and praise, to challenge and support, to opportuni- ties for (sometimes painful) growth. It’s especially risky to write in ways that challenge the dominant disciplinary norms, a fact many great thinkers have encountered in their quests for knowledge and progressive change. My project endorses many norms in my discipline—like the importance of using direct textual evidence to support claims about literature and culture, the need for accurate, consistent systems of citation, the assertion that representations have a direct, but complicated relationship to lived existence, and the claim that creative, artistic production is both valuable and necessary to human life. I join with feminist writers working in vari- ous disciplines in revealing the operation of patriarchy in representation and culture, an approach which, while perhaps not universally accepted, is certainly routinely practiced and endorsed across disciplines and campuses nation-wide. These are not moments of great risk for me, I think. But there are two instances in which I do, perhaps, risk something. The fi rst is this: I believe that academic writing should be accessible to non-specialist readers. This is not to say that I dislike theory, because I fi nd literary theory to be one of the most vibrant areas of research and scholar- ship within the discipline, a revitalizing force that imbues my own analy- ses in myriad ways. But I think that complex ideas can be communicated in accessible, understandable prose, and even more, that academic writing can be creative, humorous, autobiographical, and playful (in the Derridean sense). I have tried to embody my belief in the importance of accessible, playful language in my own writing throughout this book. Maybe my language-play has succeeded, and maybe it hasn’t—you’ll be the judge of that. But I hope you’ll enjoy it, and see it as play, rather than irreverence, as an invitation to join with me in reading the stories we’ll discuss together, a call to enjoy the interpretative act. x Preface The other risk I’ve taken is to move outside my primary fi eld of exper- tise—medieval and early modern literature—to incorporate the ideas and research of scholars in fi elds like economics, history, philosophy, religion, and fi lm studies. While I have made every effort to represent accurately their methodologies and conclusions, I know that my search for answers took me far beyond the comfortable lines of verse full of maidens and jousts to which I’m so accustomed. I beg your indulgence (and theirs) for any missteps I have made while I visited, and I offer in my defense only this: to understand the operation of representation in a culture, we must learn about many aspects of that culture, far too many to be encompassed in one discipline. It is a privilege to enter the conversation with such powerful voices. I anticipate, and expect, that conversation to continue the moment this book leaves the presses, and I hope that my work generates fruitful lines of inquiry and opens up new avenues of discussion. I am well aware of the way in which our own biases and assumptions appear transparent, no matter how we try to analyze them ourselves, until someone else points them out; I am therefore grateful for the uncomfortable, but necessary moments of intellectual growth which will surely arise as my project reaches readers and generates responses. These risks seem small, however, when compared to the risk of not writing. Not only are there well-known and well-bemoaned occupational and institutional rewards for producing, but this project has personal importance for me. It matters to me how women are represented in the world, and not simply because I am a woman (though I’m sure that has a lot to do with it). It also matters to me how men are represented, how representations function, and how they impact lives. My book is about those things. I hope they matter to you. Acknowledgments I will always be grateful that there were so many people who so willingly contributed to my success on this project.

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