Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe.

By Lyndal Roper (New York: Routledge, 1994. ix plus 254pp. $24.99).

In this collection of essays, Lyndal Roper explores religion, sex, and subjectivity in early modern Europe. Seven of these essays have been previously published; two appear here for the first time. A provocative introduction places the essays in a broader historiographic context and provides a framework for reading them as discrete explorations of several interwoven problems. Natalie Zemon Davis, Norbert Elias, Carlo Ginzburg, Judith Butler, Thomas Laqueur, Joan Scott, and Clifford Geertz, among others, serve as the signposts by which Roper situates her work.

These essays have three main thematic preoccupations: subjectivity, gender, and magic. Roper argues that psychic phenomena should hold a more prominent place in our understanding of early modern culture. While she applauds recent historians for exploiting anthropological models, she also insists that these second-hand models have pernicious side-effects. They privilege the cultural over the psychic, the collective over the individual. Roper worries that while such models have made clear the foreignness of the early modern world, they have at the same time made it difficult for historians to appreciate individual experience. Research focused on the behavior of groups has flattened our understanding of the variety of the early modern psyche: "... I want to argue against an excessive emphasis on the cultural creation of subjectivity, and to argue that witchcraft and exorcism, those most alien of early modern social phenomena, or courtship and ritual, those seemingly irreducibly collective early modern social events, cannot be understood without reference to their psychic dimension." (p. 3) Oedipus and the Devil is, among other things, an attempt to recuperate a place for individual subjectivity in historical discourse.

The book's second main concern is gender. Roper describes how notions of masculinity and femininity were negotiated in Reformation Germany. Men's bodies were seen as seething cauldrons of excess, women's as fragile sanctuaries constantly threatened with dishonor. Shifts in the religious landscape were accompanied by shifts in how people understood their bodies. Roper resists discourse-centered understandings of the body. Insisting that sex differences have their own physiological and psychological reality, she calls for "an understanding of sexual difference which will incorporate, not fight against, the corporeal." (p. 18) The third thread tying these essays together is magic and witchcraft. The early modern period saw a renewed interest in magic and the irrational. Understandings of witches and their magic were connected both to gender and to the individual subjectivities that Roper is so eager to describe. The book's introduction thus establishes an ambitious and multi-faceted agenda.

The first three essays look at relations between men and women, paying particular attention to marriage. "Sexual Utopianism in the German Reformation," traces shifts in the ways people understood marriage and sexuality. The Reformation's reintroduction of clerical marriage had important theological implications. According to Roper, it obliged reformers "... to build a new accommodation between sexuality and the sacred." (p. 79) Marriage became the cornerstone of political and social order, while some groups explored sexual utopianism. The Dreamers, for example, were a group of peasants who, according to their own testimony, contracted marriages at the command of the spirit. This same lusty spirit sometimes instructed dutiful followers to have sexual intercourse two or three times a night. Linking the peculiar activities of the Dreamers to reformulations of marriage found among more mainstream reformers, Roper does an excellent job of explaining the theological and social logic behind sexual utopianism.

The next three essays deal with gender. Looking at the drinking, fighting, and flamboyant clothing of early modern men, Roper argues that the norms of masculinity were just as often disruptive and violent as they were orderly, disciplining, and rigid. She challenges historical narratives which portray the Reformation as a period of societal discipline imposed by an increasingly well-ordered state. The Discipline Ordinances of the 1530s and 1540s did not proceed uniformly and systematically. Their promulgation and application was a partial and hesitant affair which often bred new social divisions. Turning to literary evidence, Roper argues that disciplinary literature and the ribald literature of excess were not really opposites, but were two sides of the same coin.

Roper's interest in subjectivity and psychoanalytic models is most explicit in the final trio of essays dealing with witchcraft. In "Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany," Roper notes the prominence of lying-in maids among those accused of witchcraft. She argues that such accusations were often the result of new mothers projecting their ambivalence toward their new-born children onto the maids: "The themes of much witchcraft, I would argue are to be found not in simple sexual antagonisms between men and women, but in deeply conflicted feelings about motherhood." (p. 217) The psychic experience of witchcraft is described as unfolding in the relationship between accused witches and their interrogators.

The collection as a whole offers a tantalizing glimpse of early modern society or, as Roper might prefer, of a handful of early modern psyches. One of the book's great strengths is Roper's ability to reconcile seemingly incompatible phenomena: ideas about marriage in mainstream and in heterodox religious groups, the literature of discipline and the literature of excess, or the logic of banking and the logic of crystal balls. The material Roper describes is so stimulating that one wonders to what extent her conclusions can be generalized. The bulk of her research is based on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century criminal records from the Stadtarchiv Augsburg. Roper's conclusions about the dynamics of gender, religion, and witchcraft in sixteenth-century Augsburg are promising enough to invite comparative work. Are such psyches peculiar to Augsburg?

This is a provocative and well-researched collection. Roper proposes innovative interpretive models, while keeping her evidence firmly in sight. She establishes a bracing agenda and, in many cases, her interpretive framework bears rich fruit. Her attempt to restore a psychic dimension to the witches of Augsburg, for example, lends these women a depth that they might not enjoy were their behavior understood as the epiphenomena of culture. As one would expect of such a collection, individual essays pursue Roper's stated agenda more or less systematically. Some essays touch on gender, the psychic, and witchcraft, while others touch on only one of these subjects. Some address subjectivity and the psychic explicitly, while others only tangentially or not at all. In one essay, Roper deploys Foucault, if only for strategic purposes: "Whatever the problems of the Foucauldian approach, it has at least the merit of a more sophisticated understanding of the body and sexuality, one that enables the historian to explore the construction of sexual desire through language, broadly interpreted." (p. 155) Here Roper seems to adopt the discourse-centered approach to the body and to sexual desire that she disavows elsewhere. Such inconsistencies perhaps give the collection a more nuanced feel than would result from the single-minded pursuit of a particular agenda. As Roper writes, "It is far easier to insist on the need for a history of early modern culture which will incorporate the subjective, the psychic and the corporeal than it is to know how that history will look." (p. 26) Oedipus and the Devil makes promising steps toward such a history.

Jeffrey A. Bowman Kenyon College