Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts.

This volume reviews recent scholarship on witch hunts in early modern Europe, bringing gender to the foreground as the primary category of analysis. Given the fact that, by Barstow's count, eighty percent of those accused and eighty-five percent of those killed were women, surprisingly little attention has been paid to gender in analyses of witchcraft prosecutions. As Barstow correctly asserts, "less has been written about the victims (mostly female) than about their victimizers (mostly male)" (58). Barstow is certainly not the only scholar to ask why the majority of those accused of witchcraft were women, or how gender shaped the definition of the crime and the nature of its prosecution and punishment. Because she consults almost no primary evidence (although an appendix provides an introductory guide), Barstow has slender grounds on which to base new interpretations of the prosecutions; nor does she have much new knowledge to offer. However, she does offer a valuable survey of recent work and insistently reminds the reader that witch hunts are an important part of women's history, an extreme outbreak of a persistent misogyny rather than an exception or aberration. She also raises thought-provoking questions about the work that has been done, and the assumptions that have informed it.

Because she has not undertaken original research, Barstow is freed up instead to offer a sweeping and revealing survey of witchcraft prosecutions in England, Scotland, Germany, France, Ireland, Russia, Scandinavia, Hungary, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Her comparative approach offers specialists in any one region a quick introduction to work on others. Most important, it enables her to raise the unanswerable but fascinating question of why the death toll was so much higher in some countries (especially Germany) than in others. Barstow attends to differences, arguing that, while misogyny was bad everywhere, in some places the law colluded with rather than constrained it. But she is most interested in charting the operations of misogyny across time and place.

The liability of Barstow's method is that it can result in simplistic, undernuanced, or unsupported claims. For instance, Barstow speculates about what women who attended Anna Pappenheimer's execution in Bavaria in 1600 would have thought and felt. "For the woman watching her, what was changed and transformed by the ritual was her belief about herself" (158-59). How can we know this? Even if we could document that one woman felt this way, how could we be sure that all women did? Attributing anachronistic responses to women in the past can silence their history as effectively as not attending to them at all. One of the most troubling aspects of witchcraft prosecutions, for example, is that women accused other women, testified against them, and searched their bodies for incriminating marks. Obviously, women did not inevitably identify with the accused. Why not? It is easy to agree with Barstow that misogyny was a vital component in witchcraft belief and prosecution. It is much harder to understand why some women were accused and not others, or why so many trials ended in acquittal.

I find Barstow most suggestive in her discussion of the sadistic, eroticized violence directed against accused women. This analysis could have been developed further by comparison to the sexualized violence against male offenders (such as the severing and burning of traitors' genitals) and to the role eroticized violence played in martyrologies and saints' lives. But Barstow's emphasis does remind her readers that the history of discipline and punishment is a gendered one, and that the history of women is inseparable from the history of violence. Barstow also considers witch-hunts as part of economic history, helpfully juxtaposing scholarship on women and work with economic analyses of witchcraft. By this means, she shows that the feminization of poverty and the criminalization of poverty occurred simultaneously.

FRANCES E. DOLAN Miami University