Pub Date : 2018-11-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0006
Laura Kounine
The process of identifying the witch brought questions about emotions, gender, and selfhood to the fore. As witchcraft was a crime largely without evidence, legal and religious authorities had to employ their expertise in their attempts to uncover the truth about a person. The trial process reveals the overlapping and at times contradictory individual, communal, legal, and religious understandings of not only witchcraft, but more fundamental categories of sin, morality, free will, guilt, and innocence. The trial process further reveals how individual and communal narratives took on, and themselves shaped, understandings of witchcraft, gender, and emotions in popular media, visual culture, and intellectual treatises. The way in which people attempted to make sense of themselves and each other, how the body and emotions were ‘read’, and how this was gendered, was thus at the very heart of the struggle to identify the witch.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-08DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198799085.003.0005
Laura Kounine
This chapter examines representations of the witch in the visual and intellectual imagination. Early sixteenth-century images show witches as female and eroticized. Yet by the seventeenth century, these ‘typical’ representations break down, and visual depictions include large groups of men and women. As the gendered profile changes, so do the emotions depicted: from female lust to collective debauchery, from envy to fear. We witness the same ambiguity in depictions of the witch in early modern intellectual thought. Focusing on Nicolas Remy’s Daemonolatria (1595), this chapter shows that intellectual thought could conceptualize both male and female witches, which challenges the idea that witches were women, because of their heightened emotions and their increased vulnerability to the Devil’s temptations. Instead, witchcraft could be understood through the lens of a violent Devil, who, driven by jealousy and anger, subjugated both men and women through force.
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Pub Date : 2018-11-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0004
Laura Kounine
This chapter deals with the role of the self and conscience in defending oneself against the charge of witchcraft. To add depth to intellectual concepts—and teleologies—of the self, we must understand how the individual self was understood, felt, and experienced. Particularly for the crime of witchcraft, the crux of the trial was premised on the moral question of what kind of person would commit such a crime. Those on trial for witchcraft in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg invoked the idioms of ‘mind’, ‘conscience’, ‘heart’, or ‘self’ in constructing their defence. Through four case studies, ranging from 1565 to 1678, this chapter examines the different ways in which people could conceptualize their person, and shows that change over time in the ‘development’ of the modern self was not a uniform or directly linear pattern.
{"title":"Confession, conscience, and selfhood on trial","authors":"Laura Kounine","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter deals with the role of the self and conscience in defending oneself against the charge of witchcraft. To add depth to intellectual concepts—and teleologies—of the self, we must understand how the individual self was understood, felt, and experienced. Particularly for the crime of witchcraft, the crux of the trial was premised on the moral question of what kind of person would commit such a crime. Those on trial for witchcraft in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg invoked the idioms of ‘mind’, ‘conscience’, ‘heart’, or ‘self’ in constructing their defence. Through four case studies, ranging from 1565 to 1678, this chapter examines the different ways in which people could conceptualize their person, and shows that change over time in the ‘development’ of the modern self was not a uniform or directly linear pattern.","PeriodicalId":252314,"journal":{"name":"Imagining the Witch","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125709563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-11-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0002
Laura Kounine
This chapter examines the legal, communal, and individual understandings of witchcraft. Witchcraft, at its most fundamental, involves wishing harm to others. It thus centrally concerns the impact of emotional states on physical ones. In a court of law, since physical evidence of witchcraft was highly ambiguous, interrogators, accusers, and witnesses had to search for other signs to prove the accused guilty. How did they behave during a trial? What did their physical features and reactions reveal about their emotional states? How was someone’s physical and mental state utilized in the courtroom as ‘proof’ of their supposed transgressions? By comparing how mind and body were understood in both male and female witch-trials, this chapter sheds light on broader understandings of gendered expectations of emotional repertoires, as well as cultural, legal, and medical notions of what constituted innocence, guilt, and the ‘truth’.
{"title":"Being on trial","authors":"Laura Kounine","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799085.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the legal, communal, and individual understandings of witchcraft. Witchcraft, at its most fundamental, involves wishing harm to others. It thus centrally concerns the impact of emotional states on physical ones. In a court of law, since physical evidence of witchcraft was highly ambiguous, interrogators, accusers, and witnesses had to search for other signs to prove the accused guilty. How did they behave during a trial? What did their physical features and reactions reveal about their emotional states? How was someone’s physical and mental state utilized in the courtroom as ‘proof’ of their supposed transgressions? By comparing how mind and body were understood in both male and female witch-trials, this chapter sheds light on broader understandings of gendered expectations of emotional repertoires, as well as cultural, legal, and medical notions of what constituted innocence, guilt, and the ‘truth’.","PeriodicalId":252314,"journal":{"name":"Imagining the Witch","volume":"439 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132895079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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