Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews

The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany

Author: Sigrid Brauner
ISBN: 9781558492974

Brauner shows that the modern notion of the witch as a willful, conniving, promiscuous woman was first established by German Inquisitors in the Malleus maleficarum (1487). In subsequent works by Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century playwrights Paul Rebhun and Hans Sachs, the witch emerged as the counterpart to the new feminine ideal of the urban housewife. By demonstrating how the binary concepts of "good" housewife and "bad wife" (or witch) were propagated among the educated urban elite who presided over witch trials, Brauner suggests that the witch hunts functioned to discipline women who failed to display the docility and subservience expected of the new urban housewife.

Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Publish Date: 2001

Subjects: History / General, Body, Mind & Spirit / Witchcraft, Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: History)