Posts

What is ‘trans history’, anyway?: Historiographical theory and practice in a flourishing field

Abstract

This article provides an overview of theory and practice in current trans historical scholarship. It delineates key historiographical discussions and examines their implications for one of the most controversial and long-standing questions in the field: when does trans history begin? It is argued that there are three prominent schools of thought in contemporary trans history — the Feinberg school, which views trans history as extending into antiquity; the medical school, which views it as beginning in the mid-nineteenth or early-twentieth century with the coining of ‘trans’ medical terminology; and the intersectional school, which shifts emphasis away from the question of when trans ‘began’ and towards a discussion of its social, cultural, and political entanglements alongside other forms of identity and oppression.

Keywords: Trans history, trans historiography; transgender, transsexual, LGBT+.

A note on names and pronouns: This article uses each author’s preferred name at the time of writing. Some books and articles examined here were originally published under a different first name. The gender-neutral pronouns they/them and ze/hir are used where applicable.

Author Biography

Rebecca Hickman is a PhD History student at the University of Nottingham, funded by Midlands4Cities. Her research examines the role of ‘recognition’ in the British trans rights movement

What is ‘trans history’, anyway?: Historiographical theory and practice in a flourishing field

Download PDF

Since the first institutional shoots of what is now called ‘transgender studies’ emerged in the late-twentieth century, commentators have perennially called it an ‘emerging’ field. However, as Regina Kunzel argued in the first volume of the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) in 2014, trans scholarship, with its own journal, several archival institutions, and a number of edited collections, is now better described as ‘vibrant, diverse, and flourishing’.[1] In addition to the general overviews provided by the two Transgender Studies Reader volumes,[2] more targeted edited volumes like Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory (2010), Transfeminist Perspectives in an beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (2012), and Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (2016), have seen trans scholarship — secure in its foundations — subdivide itself into specialist lines of inquiry. The maturation in the previous decade of trans of colour critique, one of the most intellectually progenitive elements in contemporary trans studies, has been punctuated by a 2011 volume of Feminist Studies titled ‘Race and Transgender Studies’ and a 2017 volume of TSQ titled the ‘Issue of Blackness’. There are still significant limitations, however — not least of which is the field’s geographic truncation. Of the various national and regional subsections, North American trans studies is, by some margin, the most institutionally developed, with a dominant share of the field’s major monographs, edited volumes, journals, archival institutions, and research/teaching positions.[3]

Trans history has undergone much the same developmental trajectory as the broader field. Some of the leading theorists in trans studies have been historians, while many of the seminal texts of trans scholarship are histories by discipline or at least carry historically-oriented arguments.[4] The centrality of history to this new academic ecosystem is attributable in part to the pressing question of where trans phenomena ‘came from’. Put simply, dispelling myths that trans is a ‘fad’ remains key to its historicisation. In addition to its political and cultural timeliness, trans history’s rise has also been aided by concurrent developments in trans archiving: most significantly, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, Canada, the largest trans archive in the world, was founded in 2007, while the Digital Transgender Archive, a valuable and accessible resource with global reach, was launched in 2016. In the United Kingdom there are numerous institutions with archives partly or entirely relating to trans history, including the Museum of Transology, the Queer Beyond London Project, the Hall-Carpenter Archives, and the Bishopsgate Institute, as well as records kept by former or current activists. Trans-related files are also gradually becoming available at the National Archives, Kew, and oral history collections are growing in size and number.[5] Given this growth in catalogued source material, efforts to codify a trans archival praxis have emerged to consider pressing methodological and ethical issues like the inclusion of pre-trans forms of gender-nonconformity under the label ‘trans’,[6] and the handling of material that relates to living and marginalised people/communities.[7] Trans historians beginning their research career today have the luxury of entering a field with an evolved praxis and an exponentially growing list of canonical texts.

The field has matured to such an extent that there are now recognisably distinct schools of thought within it. I will examine three of the most prominent schools here — which I will call the Feinberg school (after the pioneering American trans activist and historian, Leslie Feinberg), the medical school, and the intersectional school — and will argue that each group’s view of trans history ultimately stems from a fundamental disagreement about when the trans past actually begins (or, alternatively, whether there is any theoretical value in trying to pin down a precise trans ‘beginning’). Scholars from the Feinberg school envision a long chronology, believing trans identity and practice to be as old as humanity itself. Conversely, those in the medical school typically place trans history’s beginnings quite recently: either in the 1950s, when ‘sex-change’ stories became media sensations; or otherwise in the mid-nineteenth century, when the actual phraseology of transvestism and transsexuality was coined. Intersectional trans histories, though often focusing on the 1800s and 1900s, tend to shift emphasis away from the question of when trans history begins towards the question of why trans took over as the dominant mode of understanding gender-nonconformity.

Each answer is tied up with other fundamental questions, like the supposed ‘causes’ of trans, and each carries heavy political implications. For instance, if trans is ‘caused’ by inexpungible biological factors (a notion, it must be noted, that is rejected or problematised in many trans discourses[8]) or otherwise infused into the human condition, it follows that it is likely older than recorded history. Thinkers of the Feinberg school use the ‘fact’ of trans antiquity as the foundation stone for their campaign for respect and rights. Those who see trans as regressive or inimical to women’s ‘sex-based rights’,[9] on the other hand, have argued that it is a new invention and that, having arisen from nothing, it can return to nothing with enough social and political pressure. Many of the theories discussed below are thus responses to immediate political contingencies. Indeed, from the beginning, the very existence of trans history has itself been a point of contention. Bombarded by condescension and erasure, early pioneers in the field were continually required to justify their own professional existence.

 

Justification

Trans history had to overcome numerous theoretical and practical barriers in its early years. Emerging after at least three decades of gay and queer historical inquiry, for example, trans history had to contend with the fact that many potentially ‘trans’ historical figures had already been co-opted as lesbian or gay. This led some trans people to feel that ‘their history was being taken away’, particularly where trans men were concerned.[10] Nan Alamilla Boyd observed that lesbian and trans communities ‘share a common but sometimes hostile relationship to overlapping historical geographies’, resulting in tempestuous discussions over whether certain individuals were butch lesbians or trans men.[11] Both claims could be seen as ahistorical in the sense that they impose contemporary concepts on figures who existed in different intellectual and discursive ecosystems from our own, assuming the existence of a transhistorical, underlying truth behind sex and gender that, as French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault argued in the context of hermaphroditism, has not always been regarded as ontologically necessary.[12] In that regard, neither can be characterised as ‘correct’, but nor should either be disregarded entirely. Lesbian and trans scholars draw different significances from historical gender-nonconformity because they are attempting to shed light on distinct aspects of the ‘relationships of power’[13] perpetuated via sexuality, sex, and gender. Trans scholars simply had the practical misfortune of coming second to the historical co-option game.

Even more fundamentally, various influential authors around the turn of the twenty-first century cast doubt on the historicity of trans and emphasised instead its futurity. For better or worse, trans temporality was widely seen as quintessentially futuristic, having revolutionised our relationship with nature, medical technology, and time in a ‘postmodern’ world.[14] Every trans life seemed to remove another brick from cultural and biological shibboleths once held inviolable.[15] This perception came to a head in the 1980s and 1990s, when the concurrent rise of home computers and the Internet made the growing visibility of trans people seem like part of a broader post-structural ontological crisis in the digital age[16] — a ‘punk hyper-modernity’, as Paul B. Preciado dubbed it.[17]

As befitting the era of existentialist science fiction films like Bladerunner (1982) and The Matrix (1999), some commentators borrowed sci-fi terminology to describe this disturbance in the order of things. Donna Haraway, a defining late-twentieth century feminist, argued that trans medical procedures were part of a new ‘cyborg’ humanity, heralding a ‘post-gender world’ where the organic and the artificial comingled.[18] This was the final frontier of post-structuralism; a Rubicon; a brave new world where ‘no amount of trying’ could ever revive the perceived simplicity of the past.[19] For some, like prolific trans historian Susan Stryker, ‘posthuman’ epistemology brought exciting new possibilities.[20] For others, including ‘trans-exclusionary’ feminists like Janice Raymond and Germaine Greer, trans identity represented an existential new threat to women’s rights — an attempt by the patriarchy to undermine the political coherence of womanhood so as to undo the progress of feminism.[21] Either way, as literary critic Rita Felski recognised, there was a tendency for trans and non-trans commentators alike to see the birth of trans temporality as a rupture in history. Felski notes that, as the third millennium approached,

gender emerge[d] as a privileged symbolic field for the articulation of diverse fashionings of history and time within postmodern thought. Thus the destabilization of the male/female divide is seen to bring with it a waning of temporality, teleology, and grand narrative; the end of sex echoes and affirms the end of history.

Accordingly, Felski writes, the transgender subject is portrayed as ‘either apocalyptic or redemptive metaphor’.[22]

Swept away by the intoxicating futurity of the new millennium, few cisgender[23] scholars stopped to wonder if there was a longer trans story to tell. In this discursive context, the contention that trans has a history at all was revolutionary. Indeed, proving the existence of a trans past became a key method for justifying trans people’s right to live as they see fit in the present. This is why early historical works by trans authors read more like political manifestos than Rankean scholarly texts. Faced by the erasure of trans existence from mainstream consciousness, social disenfranchisement, and often physical violence, several trans authors responded with a simple, powerful message: trans people have always existed, and we therefore deserve rights. This argument has been extant for over half a century. As early as 1969, trans man Reed Erickson wrote that ‘transsexualism has been a human problem since the most ancient times’[24] — but it acquired new momentum with the publication of Missouri-born Jewish trans activist Leslie Feinberg’s book, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, in 1996. Having grown up wondering if gender-nonconforming people have historical precedent, Feinberg began hir journey of discovery in the 1970s after seeing statuettes of Two-Spirit people at the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Ze discovered that, in ‘far-flung cultures all over the world’,[25] from ancient Greece and Egypt to pre-colonial India, Africa, and America to medieval France and industrial Wales, there have been individuals who existed outside of the modern man/woman binary. Transgender Warriors co-opts many of these historical subjects as essentially proto-trans — embodying the fundamental characteristics of trans as we know it, but, in Feinberg’s Marxist view, lacking the impetus to politically organise as a distinct community before ‘patriarchal class divisions’ had fully taken hold.[26] The belief that trans is a recent techno-capitalist invention is therefore turned on its head. By arguing that ‘transgender predates oppression’ by thousands of years, and that ‘ancient communal societies held transgendered people in high esteem’,[27] Feinberg lays claim to the legitimisation of antiquity for an otherwise embattled and marginalised community.

Feinberg’s work was understandably popular. ‘Trans people have always existed’ is a simple, rhetorically impactful, and easily replicated contention. Even as criticism of this mode of trans historicisation mounted in the late-2000s and 2010s, drawing attention to the historical contingency of trans temporality and the problems inherent in applying modern labels to fundamentally different times and cultures, popular and academic authors alike continued to cling to Feinberg’s methodology. German-American poet and filmmaker Max Wolf Valerio, in his 2006 memoir, argued that people like him ‘have always existed, in every era, on every continent’.[28] And in 2013, anthropologist-archaeologist Mary Weismantel published an impassioned plea for a ‘transgender archaeology’ that would perform ‘a queer rampage through prehistory’. This was presented as an exercise in reclamation, since, Weismantel argues, prior archaeologists lacked the analytical tools to understand gender-liminality or extra-binary existences and therefore failed to do justice to gendered temporalities alien to the modern Western binary. ‘It is as if the premodern past had to wait for transgender scholarship to arrive’, she wrote.[29] That trans has always existed in one form or another is therefore axiomatic.

As discussed at greater lengths below, the dictum of trans antiquity remains a powerful force in trans scholarship to this day. It does not, however, hold a monopoly over trans historical imaginations. It has long competed with the medicine-centric narrative that places the beginnings of trans history somewhere between 1850-1950 — the period when medical professionals, particularly sexologists, coined the terminology of trans and popularised the notion that trans was a pathological or intersex condition that could be treated with a specific set of therapeutic, endocrinological, and surgical procedures. This narrative largely takes from Foucault’s conceptualisation of the early days of Western medicine, when an ‘immense will to knowledge’, as he put it, brought new epistemological categories into being so as to give order and coherence to the world.[30] Medicine-centric narratives argue that the origins of trans history proper can be traced directly to this milieu.

Designation

Many of the foundational texts of trans studies — texts that pre-date the field and provided the theoretical building blocks from which it was built — concern themselves with the role of medical knowledge in the conditions of modernity. Most obviously, Foucault’s work on ‘biopower’, which refers to the means by which the state gains ‘access even to the body’ to regulate the behaviour of its citizens,[31] and ‘epistemes’,[32] the epistemological systems that define how we catalogue the world around us and conceptualise (im)possibilities, is often regarded as elementary to subsequent trans analysis.[33] Foucault pays particular attention to the justification and perpetuation of invasive state regulation via medical authority in contemporary society, a subject of immediate concern for trans writers. Another oft-cited work is Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), from which trans scholars take the lesson that the modern ‘incommensurable’ categories of sex came about through medical science’s ‘discursive creation of difference’ in the nineteenth century, and that they ‘are not the necessary, natural consequence of corporeal difference’.[34] It was against the cultural backdrop of this medico-scientific episteme that sexologists like the German pioneers Magnus Hirschfeld and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs discussed theories to explain deviations from binary sex. Modern trans designation was coined at this time and gained in popularity throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Just as pioneering lesbian and gay historians placed great emphasis on the modern medical origins of labels like ‘homosexual’,[35] many trans historians have understandably taken this period as their starting point. Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (1980), is an influential example of medicine-focused trans history, looking at the pathologised category ‘transsexual’ and the emergence of gender ‘reassignment’ procedures in the United States in the twentieth century.[36] There have also been historical studies looking at the development of medical ideas in Britain. Clare Tebbutt, in particular, submitted a doctoral thesis to the University of Manchester in 2015 titled ‘Medical and Popular Understandings of Sex Changeability in 1930s Britain’, which shows how the growth of endocrinology shifted both professional and popular beliefs about the fluidity of sex and created the conceptual space for ‘trans’ to exist. Adrian Kane-Galbraith, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, is examining the entanglement of bureaucratic and medical practices in British gender transition between the Second World War and the 1970s.

Howard Chiang could be seen as the current standard-bearer of the medical school. His recent book, After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018), narrates the replacement, in early-twentieth century China, of an episteme mediated by traditional Chinese medicine with one mediated by modern gender-dimorphic Western medicine. Chiang argues that the way the Chinese word xing came to be equivalated with the Western biomedical notion of sex ‘reflects a broader underlying transformation in its epistemological designation of human nature: from the rock-solid essence of things into a mutable ontological referent’.[37] He coins the term ‘epistemic modernity’ to describe this new worldview.[38] It was under the auspices of epistemic modernity that eunuchs, integral to the courtly culture of Imperial China, came to be regarded as symptoms of a national backwardness, a disease, in the Republican and Communist eras. By the mid-twentieth century, Chiang argues, Western notions of ‘transsexuality’ had replaced eunuchs as the dominant mode of understanding gender-liminal people, handing doctors the ‘alleged authority [to] unlock the secret of sexual identity’.[39]

While After Eunuchs offers valuable insights into how the ‘modern’ Western biomedical episteme interacted with non-Western epistemes, it is lacking in key areas which point to the general shortcomings of the medical school of trans history, with its focus on trans temporality’s dependence on the conditions of modernity that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, despite the book’s attentiveness to epistemic specificity, there is a surprising laxity in Chiang’s use of terminology. In one paragraph he refers to the same individual as ‘transgender’, a ‘cross-dresser’, and a ‘transvestite’, with no indication as to how these terms should be differentiated. Additionally, some of the book’s more innovative points are underdeveloped. For instance, Chiang insists on the agency of eunuchs in their own ‘social and cultural reproduction’ through the finding and raising of new eunuchs and through passing down their customs,[40] subverting the view that physical castration automatically discounts reproduction. However, he does not carry this point forward to insist on the agency of trans people in mid-century to mediate the contours of their own identities. Instead, Chiang gives primacy to medicine and the state, creating the impression that trans existence was impossible outside the walls of the clinic.

To be clear, scholars of trans medical history do not argue that trans as it now exists is purely a medical phenomenon, still less that all gender-nonconformity is only explicable through a medical lens. Chiang, for instance, specifically warns against ‘the assumption that the nature of the historical relationship of sex to science was fundamentally fixed so that an undisguised view of xing (as sex) was merely waiting to be acquired’.[41] Rather, the medical school argues that trans phraseology and phenomenology itself arose from the specific sexological milieu of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and cannot be separated entirely from this historical contingency. The problem is that, in privileging medical discourses, the agency of trans people themselves is often obscured. Their nonconformity seems to derive entirely from their interactions with medicine, rather than being dialogically formulated, negotiated, and affirmed and only later being identified and diagnosed with reference to medical concepts. It was partly in response to this shortcoming that another strand of trans historiography gathered pace in the 2000s and 2010s. This school largely took its inspiration from postmodern intersectional feminist thought and places trans within a much wider nexus of interlocking identity forms and oppressions, principally race and racism.

 

Intersection

Intersectional and trans of colour trans history had a long incubation. One key aspect of its worldview can be traced directly to the postmodern feminist theorising of Judith Butler in the 1990s. Her book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), is used as the basis for viewing gender as ‘performative’ and therefore malleable, rather than biologically infused. Almost immediately upon publication, as literary critic Jay Prosser observed, Gender Trouble (GT) ran away from Butler. Despite the fact that GT barely mentions trans people and is more concerned with drag, it still ‘transformed transgender into a queer icon, in the process becoming something of an icon of the new queer theory itself’.[42] In order to fulfil this role, the original ‘underwent a certain overreading, playful exaggeration, [and] mischievous adding of emphasis’.[43] Readers latched onto buried sentences about gender being a ‘stylized repetition of acts’,[44] and paid little attention to Butler’s post-GT interventions, in which she warned against seeing gender as a free-for-all.[45] Nevertheless, the atomised version of GT took deep hold in trans studies, as demonstrated by Susan Stryker’s reading of performativity in her introduction to the first Transgender Studies Reader (2006):

To say that gender is a performative act is to say that it does not need a material referent to be meaningful […] is not subject to falsification or verification, and is accomplished by “doing” something rather than “being” something. A woman, performatively speaking, is one who says she is. […] The biologically sexed body guarantees nothing; […] it has no deterministic relationship to performative gender.[46]

Belief in the performativity of gender became a necessary precursor to later critiques of the Feinberg and medical schools of trans history. If trans is neither a distinct set of practices and characteristics that can be traced into antiquity, nor a biologically or neurologically intrinsic trait, but rather something that is performed, socially reproduced, and perpetuated in relation to changing cultural norms, then the issue of its social utility as a category of otherness becomes more important than its ‘causes’. Giving primacy to social analysis, in turn, prompts questions about how trans interacts with other categories of identity and oppression, like race, disability, class, and sexuality — in a word, its intersectionality.

Often traced back to the Combahee River Collective Statement in Boston, 1977,[47] and codified in an article by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989,[48] intersectional feminism resists totalising narratives that collapse complex human experiences of oppression into a unidimensional narrative, and advocates instead an analysis of the ways that different oppressions interact to create unique experiences. Intersectionality is widely associated with ‘third wave’ feminism, a loosely-defined signifier that came of age in the 1990s in response to the second wave’s much-critiqued analytical limitations in relation to race and class.[49] British sociologist Shelley Budgeon conceptualises the third wave as promoting individual ‘empowerment’ within an individualist ‘culture of the self that endorses self-invention, autonomy and personal responsibility’.[50] Intersectionality distils this belief in the heterogeneity of human experience into a focussed analysis of how differing experiences are shaped through the interaction of various strands of privilege and oppression. It is also closely associated with Black feminism and feminism of colour.

Even before intersectionality’s formal integration into mainstream feminist theory, recognition of the overlapping nature of oppressions was, by necessity, central to Black British feminist analysis.[51] It is fitting, then, that intersectionality was primarily introduced to trans historiography via trans of colour critique. As Ellison, Green, Richardson, and Snorton put it in their 2017 TSQ article ‘We Got Issues: Towards a Black Trans*/Studies’, Black trans theory provides impetus to investigate ‘repressed genealogies that might come into view through a more sustained engagement with blackness’. It questions, among other things, teleologies of ‘progress’ and ‘solidarity’ that push trans of colour history aside while erasing the cultural contexts in which other forms of gender liminality exist(ed). Stryker and Currah argue in their introduction to the TSQ issue ‘Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary’ that ‘transgender — grounded as it is in conceptual underpinnings that assume a sex/gender distinction as well as an analytic segregation of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression […] [is] simply foreign to most places and times’.[52] Trans of colour critique refuses to perpetuate the erasure of these histories in favour of Western whiteness.

Transgender Day of Remembrance, founded in 1999 as an annual memorial of lives lost to anti-trans violence, has proved to be an instructive focal point of scholarly attention. Sociologist Jin Haritaworn coined the term ‘trans necropolitics’ to describe the process by which trans murder victims are martyred and turned into utilities for the mainstream trans political movement. Haritaworn and C. Riley Snorton point out that ‘trans women of color act as resources—both literally and metaphorically—for the articulation and visibility of a more privileged transgender subject’. This process is ‘cannibalistic’, since it is only ‘in their death that they suddenly come to matter’.[53] Sarah Lamble has commented similarly upon the inappropriateness of white trans people ‘taking the voice of the other as our own’. In doing so, Lamble writes, ‘we colonize the bodies of the dead’.[54] This colonisation also entails the appropriation of significant events in trans of colour history as deracialised ‘gay’, ‘queer’, or ‘trans’ events — most notably the Stonewall Riots in New York, 1969. First colonised as a white gay riot, over time it was overtaken by another myth, as Jessi Gan explains, ‘that all transgender people were most oppressed and most resistant at Stonewall (and still are today)’. This myth could be ‘circulated and consumed [in] the service of a liberal multicultural logic of recognition’ that privileges white transness. It was only when an historian interviewed the Puerto Rican-Venezuelan drag queen and trans activist Sylvia Rivera in the early 1990s that the integral role of gender-nonconforming people of colour at Stonewall became widely known.[55]

Various scholars have also called into question the Feinberg school’s perennial use of ‘other cultures’ as historical proof that transgender people have always existed. As Native American studies scholar Deborah A. Miranda has explained, the Western hegemonic culture from which ‘transgender’ emerged is the very same culture which committed ‘gendercide’ against gender-nonconforming people during colonisation.[56] Those identity forms that survived are now subject to efforts by the trans umbrella to claim their history as its own. Thus, as Nael Bhanji has elaborated, trans identity ‘carries its own imperialist baggage’, which manifests in Western-centric scholarship on ‘other cultures’ as ‘a veritable buffet of exotic (trans) sexuality’ wherein ‘a rotating chain of marginality tends to be pitted against an unstated, white, Western norm’.[57]

By drawing attention to the oppressions and marginalisations fused into and perpetuated through trans temporalities, trans of colour critique fundamentally altered trans studies in the 2010s. Intersectional trans history synthesised elements from the Feinberg and medical methods, arguing that while identities, ways of life, and practices outside the Western gender binary have always existed, it is the specific political, social, and medical circumstances of the last two hundred years that have enabled them, on an ontological level, to be grouped together as ‘trans’. In this new iteration of trans history, the key objective is not to claim all historical gender-nonconformity as trans by default, nor to trace all forms of gender-nonconformity back to a common medical discursive modality, but to ask how and why trans took over as the dominant mode of understanding non-normative gender, and to identify what impact this had upon the dialogical possibilities of gendered expression.

Jules Gill-Peterson’s ground-breaking book, Histories of the Transgender Child (2018), is an influential and passionately argued example of the intersectional/trans of colour approach. Gill-Peterson’s analysis of trans children’s interactions with gender identity clinics in the United States dating back to the Interwar Years demonstrates, firstly, that children often developed their own autonomous sense of who they were long before hearing about trans medical theory, and secondly, that once they were under medical supervision their minds and bodies resisted efforts to make them fit one of the two available gender categories. This suggests that, while gender-nonconforming children do not typically get to choose the diagnostic words that are applied to them, they do play an independent role in defining what those words mean socially, subverting medical definitions with self-made forms of expression.[58] They themselves are not ‘made trans’, so to speak, by medical diagnosis or intervention, but their identities are rendered intelligible to broader society as trans. Trans terminology, once popularised and placed in the hands of the diagnosed, left the sole control of medical doctors and came to be infused with new meanings and possibilities, as can be seen in the heated debates over the definitions of ‘transvestite’, ‘transgender’, and ‘transsexual’ in the pages of Transvestia, an international magazine by and for trans people that circulated from the 1960s to the 1980s.[59] This process resembles the ‘looping effect’ theorised by Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, whose work on ‘human kinds’ stresses the dialogical back-and-forth through which feedback from the diagnosed ultimately affects the discursive contours of the diagnosis itself.[60]

C. Riley Snorton authored another seminal text in this vein. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) delves further into the construction of ‘trans’ as its own distinct category of identity, drawing particular attention to the role that racist caricatures of Black people played in delineating what a ‘normal’ male or female body looked like (i.e., conforming to a particular white vision of anatomical congruity, purity, and good health), which in turn made trans ‘conceivable’ as an exception to the rule. Starting with the use of Black chattel slaves in the experiments of early gynaecology in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with the erasure of anti-Black violence by the mainstream trans rights movement in the present, Snorton narrates how Black flesh served as the ‘malleable matter’ from which modern white notions of normative and non-normative gender are crafted.[61] Trans cannot, therefore, be understood in isolation from broader histories of systemic racism in Western medicine and society.

These theories have profound implications for trans history as a subject. Because ‘trans’ as we know it is epistemologically dependent on the conditions of modernity, claiming that trans people per se have always existed is fundamentally fallacious. To reiterate: liminal, transgressive, and nonconforming modes of identification and expression have always existed. Trans identity, specifically, has not. Intersectional trans history thus does away with a certain level of chronological and thematic precision and replaces it with a more sophisticated analysis of the cultural and social entanglements of trans. In the syntax of Foucault, the quest for historical origin, which ‘assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’, and which, as a result of this assumption, ‘neglect[s] as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history’, is dropped in favour of an appraisal of the ‘genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge’.[62] The question of when, precisely, trans history should begin — so keenly debated between the Feinberg and medical schools— is consequently and deliberately left open-ended by the intersectional school.

So, too, is the thematic remit of trans studies. As early as 2006, Susan Stryker, whose work bears the distinct mark of intersectional feminism, urged trans scholars to be ambitious, and not to limit themselves to researching people and phenomena specifically identified as ‘trans’:

[T]ransgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statutes that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood.[63]

While undoubtedly vibrant, enterprising, and pioneering, however, intersectional trans history has not replaced, but rather stands alongside, the other schools. In fact, the Feinberg model experienced something of a resurgence around the turn of the 2020s.

 

Amalgamation?

If the medical and intersectional schools both seek to deconstruct the belief that ‘trans has always existed’, the previous few years showed the notion’s capacity for endurance. This neo-Feinbergian moment encompasses both wholesale restatements of Feinberg’s original thesis and attempts to amalgamate it with current scholarly trends, expressed in both popular and academic contexts. Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the Fight for Trans Liberation (2020), by trade unionist and trans activist Laura Miles, falls into the former, less critical category. It is a primarily political text that draws on Feinberg’s Marxist view of trans oppression, particularly hir argument that systemic, institutionalised transphobia is an invention of modern capitalism.[64] Intersectionality and other intellectual traditions that might disrupt this narrative are dismissed by Miles as insufficiently sensitive to the class origins of oppression. Another prominent non-academic text, Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows (2018), edited by veteran British trans campaigner Christine Burns, displays more awareness of the Feinberg line’s limitations. Burns warns readers:

Labelling figures from antiquity with modern terms such as “transgender” is a dangerous thing. People living hundreds of years ago couldn’t have ‘identified’ with such a term because it didn’t exist. We rely on the co-evolution of identities and the word available to describe them in order to provide the script for how to interpret our feelings and possibilities – the things we can be and embrace. What we can look for, however, are behaviours identified by ancient documents and life in ways that apparently departed from a simple binary man-woman model of life. Those exist throughout recorded history and across cultures.[65]

Though prefaced with this qualification, what follows in Trans Britain is a fairly orthodox recounting of trans antiquity, employing pre-trans figures like the gender-transgressive French spy, the Chevalier d’Éon (1728-1810), in service to its narrative of trans people’s ‘journey from the shadows’.[66]

Historian Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History (2020), which is dedicated to Feinberg, attempts a similar if more theoretically complex modification of hir approach. Rather than looking for historical examples of trans identity as we know it, Manion focusses on the transing of gender as an activity or process. They particularly build on Clare Sears’s dictum that studies of cross-dressing should move ‘away from the recognizable cross-dressing figure to multiple forms of cross-dressing practices’.[67] Manion argues that deemphasising the search for specifically trans identity forms avoids some of the pitfalls of the traditional argument for trans antiquity. ‘To say someone “transed” or was “transing” gender’, they write, ‘signifies a process or practice without claiming to understand what it meant to that person or asserting any kind of fixed identity on them’.[68] This entails a ‘trans reading’ of historical subjects (in this case ‘female husbands’) without ‘foreclosing’ on their mode of self-identification,[69] thus opening ‘a window into our [the trans community’s] collective past’ while not laying claim to historical actors as ‘trans’ per se.[70] The implication is that transing, rather than trans identity itself, has always existed, and this is indeed a more defensible claim. There have always been those who cross, complicate, subvert, and sit astride the categorical boundaries extant in their communities. Most of them did not understand their selfhood as do modern trans people, but this is beside the point. What matters in this modified Feinbergian approach is that the feelings, practices, concepts, movements, images, and imaginaries of the modern trans community have precedent.

Another author, Barry Reay, has proposed a different solution to the Feinberg problem. Given his pointed rejection of the idea that trans people have always existed and his insistence that trans history essentially began in the 1950s,[71] it may seem incongruous to include Reay’s Trans America: A Counter-History (2020) in a section about a Feinbergian revival. However, Trans America deviates less from theories of trans antiquity than the author himself implies. Rather than label millennia-old gender-nonconforming and gender-liminal phenomena as trans history, Reay categorises them as trans pre-history, arguing that gender-nonconforming temporalities extant before the rise of trans phraseology should be seen as ‘prefigurements of transgender: trans before trans’.[72] In effect, this is an effort to square a circle — to claim a long precedent for trans people (and therefore invoke the legitimisation of antiquity) while not participating in the fallacy of trans anachronism. It is not clear, however, what the shift from ‘trans history’ to ‘trans prehistory’ achieves on a theoretical level. The end result — the placement of all forms of gender-nonconformity and gender-liminality within a narrative that leads eventually to modern transgender — is the same. Trans pre-history might even be more problematic in some respects, since, firstly, it risks portraying ‘trans before trans’ identities and expressions as merely primitive foreshadowings of an inevitable trans endpoint (a ‘monotonous finality’, as Foucault put it[73]), and secondly, it conjures notions of a foggy past about which nothing substantial is known. Indeed, such a hard separation between ‘history’ from ‘pre-history’ potentially lowers the burden of proof for scholars seeking to link trans with pre-trans temporalities by removing the need to demonstrate an actual continuity of concepts, practices, or traditions.

It seems unlikely, then, that Reay’s model shows the best way forward. Manion’s emphasis on ‘transing’ as an historically omnipresent phenomenon is more promising, and, with its awareness of the historical contingency of trans identity (as emphasised by the medical school) and its refusal to co-opt pre-modern and non-Western gender systems as belonging to trans temporality per se (in keeping with the intersectional school), could potentially catalyse a moment of synthesis in trans historiography. Such a synthesis is long overdue, and would undoubtedly open new research trajectories should an ambitious theorist be willing to attempt it.

 

Conclusion

Whatever their theoretical and ideological stripes, fresh trans historians today can rest assured that, at the very least, they will spend far less time than their predecessors justifying the very necessity of trans historical inquiry. Though there continue to be impassioned disagreements about what it encompasses, there can no longer be any reasonable doubt that trans history exists. Whether thousands of years old, hundreds of years old, or merely tens of years old, it has been clearly established that trans is not a contemporary invention, as so many turn-of-the-century writers thought, but an ever-mutating nexus of phenomena, some of which are very old. Indeed, contrary to the popular obsession with trans-postmodernist-cyborg futurity, one of the most pressing questions now is not whether trans has a history, but whether it has a future. Leading theorists fully expect that trans, with all its entanglements in oppressive histories and invasive medical authority, will sooner or later be ‘eclipsed by new imaginaries that might not even call themselves transgender at all’.[74]

Is it possible to make educated guesses about what these new imaginaries might look like? Some authors have conducted thought experiments, positing fresh terminology not in the expectation that others will necessarily adopt it, but rather as a call for readers to think outside the box. Paul Preciado, for example, suggested a list of possible names for Internet-age queer movements that speak to the irreverence and impermanence of our ‘punk hyper-modernity’: ‘Postporno, Free Fuckware, Bodypunk, Opengender, Fuckyourfather, PenetratedState, TotalDrugs, PornTerror, Analinflaction, [or] TechnoPriapismoUniversal United’.[75] Radical liberation for gender-nonconforming people has also been integrated into broader intersectional feminist, xenofeminist, posthuman, and antihumanist future imaginaries that seek to strip gender of its ‘extraordinary explanatory power’,[76] thus embracing ‘unintelligibility’ and removing the need for formalised trans identity to exist as an exception to normative strictures.[77] To an extent, however, predictions are unnecessary. The process of formulating extra-trans and post-trans identities is already underway. Words like genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, and non-binary have been in mainstream circulation for over a decade, providing modes of self-understanding and self-representation beyond the more established trans narratives.[78] For some, these terms are merely a precursor to the total ‘deconstruction of gender’, one feature of which would be an end to the social expectation that one should make oneself sexually intelligible to others by accumulating identifying adjectives.[79] In that imaginary, all gender-nonconforming identities, and indeed gender itself, will eventually fall into disuse.

Accurate or not, this glimpse into the yet-to-be might, ironically, represent the most important lesson a passing observer can take from trans history. We and our tools of self-expression are historically contingent. The identity forms that make sense to us will not necessarily make sense to others in a few centuries, a few decades, or even a few years. Just as there was a pre-trans, so too must there be a post-trans, and, in this sense, trans history has fully anticipated its own obsolescence. It is a matter of when, not if.

 

Bibliography

Beemyn, G., ‘A presence in the past: a transgender historiography’, Journal of Women’s History, 25 (2013), pp. 113-21. DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2013.0062.

Bouchard, D. F. (ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews (Ithaca, 1977).

Brown, E. H., ‘Trans/feminist oral history: current projects’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2015), pp. 666-72. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-3151583.

Bryan, B., Dadzie, S., and Scafe, S., Heart of the race: black women’s lives in Britain (London, 1985).

Budgeon, S., Third wave feminism and the politics of gender in late modernity (Basingstoke, 2011).

Burns, C.(ed.), Trans Britain: our journey from the shadows (London, 2018).

Butler, J., Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (London, 1990).

———Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex (London, 1995).

Chiang, H., After eunuchs: science, medicine, and the transformation of sex in modern China (New York, 2018).

Crandall, M. and Schwartz, S. W., ‘Moving transgender histories: Sean Dorsey’s trans archival practice’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2015), pp. 565-77. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-3151493.

Crenshaw, K., ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), pp. 139-167.

Cuboniks, L., The xenofeminist manifesto: a politics for alienation (London, 2018).

Dea, S., Beyond the binary: thinking about sex and gender (Ontario, 2016).

Eddo-Lodge, R., Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (London, 2017).

Edwards, R., ‘”This is not a girl”: a trans* archival reading’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2015), pp. 650-65. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-3151574.

Elliot, P. (ed.), Debates in transgender, queer, and feminist theory (Farnham, 2010).

Enke, A. (ed.), Transfeminist perspectives in and beyond transgender and gender studies (Philadelphia, 2012).

Escalante, A., ‘Gender nihilism: an anti-manifesto’, 2016, <https://libcom.org/library/gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto>, accessed 13.04.2021.

Feinberg, L., Transgender liberation: a movement whose time has come (New York, 1992).

———Transgender warriors: making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston, 1996).

Foucault, M., The history of sexuality, volume 1: an introduction (London, 1978).

——— ‘Introduction’ to Herculine Barbin (New York, 1980).

———The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences (London, 1989).

Gill-Peterson, J., Histories of the transgender child (Minneapolis, 2018).

Green, R. and Money, J.(eds.), Transsexualism and sex reassignment (Baltimore, 1969).

Greer, G., The whole woman (London, 1999).

Hacking, I., Historical ontology (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

Haraway, D., Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature (London, 1991).

Heaney, E., The new woman: literary modernism, queer theory, and the trans feminine allegory (Evanston, 2017).

Hester, H., Xenofeminism (Cambridge, 2018).

Kunzel, R., ‘The flourishing of transgender studies’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), pp. 285-97. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-2399461.

Laqueur, T., Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990).

Mahoney, K., ‘Historicising the “third wave”: narratives of contemporary feminism’, Women’s History Review, 25 (2016), pp. 1006-13. DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2015.1131052.

Manion, J., Female husbands: a trans history (Cambridge, 2020).

Martínez-San Miguel, Y. and Tobias, S. (eds.), Trans studies: the challenge to hetero/homo normativities (New Brunswick, 2016).

McIntosh, M., ‘The homosexual role’, Social Problems, 161(1968), pp. 182–92. DOI: 10.2307/800003.

Meyerowitz, J., How sex changed: a history of transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1980).

Miles, L., Transgender resistance: socialism and the fight for trans liberation (London, 2020).

Miranda, D. A., ‘Extermination of the joyas: gendercide in Spanish California’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16 (2010), pp. 253-84. DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2009-022.

Mirza, H. S.(ed.), Black British feminism: a reader (London, 1997).

Olufemi, L., Feminism, interrupted: disrupting power (London, 2020).

Raymond, J. G., The transsexual empire: the making of the she-male (London, 1979).

Reay, B., Trans America: a counter-history (Cambridge, 2020).

Sares, J., ‘Postmodernism’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), pp. 158–61. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-2399902.

Scott, J., ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), pp. 1053-75. DOI: 10.2307/1864376.

Sears, C., Arresting dress: cross-dressing, law, and fascination in nineteenth-century San Francisco (Durham, NC, 2014).

Serano, J., Whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity (Berkeley, 2007).

Smith, B.(ed.), Home girls: a black feminist anthology (New York, 1983).

Snorton, C. R., Black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity (Minneapolis, 2017).

Sperber, D., Premack, D., and Premack, A. J. (eds.), Causal cognition: a multi-disciplinary debate (Oxford, 1995).

Straub, K. and Epstein, J. (eds.) Body guards: the cultural politics of gender ambiguity (New York, 1991).

Stryker, S. ‘My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: performing transgender rage’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1 (1994), pp. 237-54. DOI: 10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.

———and Whittle, S.(eds.), The transgender studies reader (London, 2006).

———and Aizura, A. Z.(eds.), The transgender studies reader 2 (London, 2013).

———and Currah, P., ‘General editors’ introduction’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), pp. 303-7. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-4348593.

———Transgender history: the roots of today’s revolution (revised edition) (New York, 2017).

Tebbutt, C., ‘Medical and popular understandings of sex changeability in 1930s Britain’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2015).

Twist, J., Vincent, B., Barker, M., and Gupta, K. (eds.), ‘Introduction’ to Non-binary lives: an anthology of intersecting identities (London, 2020).

Valentine, D., Imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category (Durham, NC, 2007).

Valerio, M. W., The testosterone files: my hormonal and social transformation from female to male (New York, 2006).

Whittle, S., ‘Guest editorial’, Journal of Gender Studies, 7 (1998), pp. 269–72. DOI: 10.1080/09589236.1998.9960720.

———The transgender debate: the crisis surrounding gender identity (Reading, 2000).

Women’s Human Rights Campaign, ‘Declaration on women’s sex-based rights’, <https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/>, accessed 10.04.2021.

Notes

[1] R. Kunzel, ‘The flourishing of transgender studies’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), pp. 285-6.

[2] S. Stryker and S. Whittle (eds.), The transgender studies reader (London, 2006); S. Stryker and A. Z. Aizura (eds.), The transgender studies reader 2 (London, 2013).

[3] Most existing trans historiographies are consequently America-centric. See, for instance, G. Beemyn, ‘A presence in the past: a transgender historiography’, Journal of Women’s History, 25 (2013), pp. 113-21.

[4] D. Valentine’s Imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category (Durham, NC, 2007), is a good example of this latter category. Another example is literary critic E. Heaney’s The new woman: literary modernism, queer theory, and the trans feminine allegory (Evanston, 2017).

[5] E. H. Brown, ‘Trans/feminist oral history: current projects’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2015), pp. 666-72.

[6] R. Edwards, ‘”This is not a girl”: a trans* archival reading’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2015), pp. 650-65.

[7] M. Crandall and S. W. Schwartz, ‘Moving transgender histories: Sean Dorsey’s trans archival practice’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2015), pp. 565-77.

[8] S. Stone, ‘The “empire” strikes back: a posttranssexual manifesto’, in K. Straub and J. Epstein (eds.) Body guards: the cultural politics of gender ambiguity (New York, 1991); J. Serano, Whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity (Berkeley, 2007), pp. 95-160.

[9] Women’s Human Rights Campaign, ‘Declaration on women’s sex-based rights’, <https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/>, accessed 10.04.2021.

[10] S. Whittle, The transgender debate: the crisis surrounding gender identity (Reading, 2000), p. 15.

[11] N. A. Boyd, ‘Bodies in motion: lesbian and transsexual histories’, in Transgender studies reader, pp.422-3.

[12] M. Foucault, ‘Introduction’ to Herculine Barbin (New York, 1980), p. vii.

[13] J. Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), p. 1067.

[14] J. Sares, ‘Postmodernism’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), pp. 158–61.

[15]S. S. Montefiore in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Sex change teacher is living proof of technological advance’, 12 January 2001.

[16] S. Stryker, Transgender history: the roots of today’s revolution (revised edition) (New York, 2017), p. 44.

[17] P. B. Preciado, ‘The pharmaco-pornographic regime: sex, gender, and subjectivity in the age of punk capitalism’, in Transgender studies reader 2, p. 269.

[18] D. Haraway, Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature (London, 1991).

[19] S. Whittle, ‘Guest editorial’, Journal of Gender Studies, 7 (1998), pp. 269–72.

[20] S. Stryker, ‘My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: performing transgender rage’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1 (1994), pp. 237-54.

[21] J. G. Raymond, The transsexual empire: the making of the she-male (London, 1979); G. Greer, The whole woman (London, 1999).

[22] R. Felski, ‘Fin de siècle, Fin du sexe: transsexuality, postmodernism, and the death of history’, in Transgender studies reader, p. 566.

[23] Defined by Oxford Languages as ‘denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.’

[24] R. Erickson, ‘Foreword’, in R. Green and J. Money (eds.), Transsexualism and sex reassignment (Baltimore, 1969), p. xi.

[25] L. Feinberg, Transgender warriors: making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston, 1996), p. 44.

[26] Ibid., pp. 49-53.

[27] L. Feinberg, Transgender liberation: a movement whose time has come (New York, 1992), pp. 5-6.

[28] M. W. Valerio, The testosterone files: my hormonal and social transformation from female to male (New York, 2006), p. 2.

[29] M. Weismantel, ‘Towards a transgender archaeology: a queer rampage through prehistory’, in Transgender studies reader 2, p. 321.

[30] M. Foucault, The history of sexuality, volume 1: an introduction (London, 1978), p 55.

[31] Ibid., p. 140.

[32] M. Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences (London, 1989).

[33] S. Dea, Beyond the binary: thinking about sex and gender (Ontario, 2016), p. 14.

[34] T. Laqueur, Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p.198 and 243.

[35] M. McIntosh, ‘The homosexual role’, Social Problems, 161(1968), pp. 182–92.

[36] J. Meyerowitz, How sex changed: a history of transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1980).

[37] H. Chiang, After eunuchs: science, medicine, and the transformation of sex in modern China (New York, 2018), p. 13.

[38] Ibid., p. 135.

[39] Ibid., p. 263.

[40] Ibid., p. 50.

[41] Ibid., p. 13.

[42] J. Prosser, ‘Judith Butler: queer feminism, transgender, and the transubstantiation of sex’, in Transgender studies reader, p. 259.

[43] Ibid., p. 260.

[44] J. Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (London, 1990), p. 191.

[45] In particular, see the emphasis on the ‘citationality’ of sex in J. Butler, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex (London, 1995).

[46] S. Stryker, ‘(De)subjugated knowledges: an introduction to transgender studies’, in Transgender studies reader, p. 10.

[47] Reproduced in B. Smith (ed.), Home girls: a black feminist anthology (New York, 1983), pp. 264–74.

[48] K. Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), pp. 139-167.

[49] K. Mahoney, ‘Historicising the “third wave”: narratives of contemporary feminism’, Women’s History Review, 25 (2016), pp. 1006-13.

[50] S. Budgeon, Third wave feminism and the politics of gender in late modernity (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 284.

[51] B. Bryan, S. Dadzie, and S. Scafe, Heart of the race: black women’s lives in Britain (London, 1985); H. S. Mirza (ed.), Black British feminism: a reader (London, 1997).

[52] S. Stryker and P. Currah, ‘General editors’ introduction’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (2014), pp. 303-4.

[53] C. R. Snorton and J. Haritaworn, ‘Trans necropolitics: a transnational reflection on violence, death, and the trans of color afterlife’, in Transgender studies reader 2, pp. 71-4.

[54] S. Lamble, ‘Retelling racialized violence, remaking white innocence: the politics of interlocking oppressions in Transgender Day of Remembrance’, in Transgender studies reader 2, p. 40.

[55] J. Gan, ‘”Still at the back of the bus”: Sylvia Rivera’s struggle’, in Transgender studies reader 2, pp. 292-3.

[56] D. A. Miranda, ‘Extermination of the joyas: gendercide in Spanish California’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16 (2010), pp. 253-84.

[57] N. Bhanji ‘Trans/scriptions: homing desires (trans)sexual citizenship and racialized bodies’, in Transgender studies reader 2, p. 513.

[58] J. Gill-Peterson, Histories of the transgender child (Minneapolis, 2018), p. 94–5.

[59] R. Hill, ‘Before transgender: Transvestia’s spectrum of gender variance, 1960-1980’, in Transgender studies reader 2, pp. 364-79.

[60] I. Hacking, ‘The looping effects of human kinds’, in D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack (eds.), Causal cognition: A multi-disciplinary debate (Oxford, 1995), pp. 351-83; I. Hacking, Historical ontology (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 99-114.

[61] C. R. Snorton, Black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity (Minneapolis, 2017), p. 135.

[62] M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews (Ithaca, 1977), pp. 142-4.

[63] Stryker, ‘(De)subjugated knowledges’, p. 3.

[64] L. Miles, Transgender resistance: socialism and the fight for trans liberation (London, 2020), pp. 18-32.

[65] C. Burns (ed.), Trans Britain: our journey from the shadows (London, 2018), p. 8.

[66] Ibid., pp. 9-11.

[67] C. Sears, Arresting dress: cross-dressing, law, and fascination in nineteenth-century San Francisco (Durham, NC, 2014), p. 9.

[68] J. Manion, Female husbands: a trans history (Cambridge, 2020), p. 11.

[69] Ibid., p. 265.

[70] Ibid., p. 264.

[71] B. Reay, Trans America: a counter-history (Cambridge, 2020), p. 2, 57.

[72] Ibid., p. 16, 55.

[73] Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, p. 76.

[74] S. Stryker and A. Z. Aizura, ‘Introduction: transgender studies 2.0’, in Transgender studies reader 2, p. 10.

[75] Preciado, ‘Pharmaco-pornographic regime’, p. 275.

[76] H. Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge, 2018), p. 49. See also L. Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist manifesto: a politics for alienation (London, 2018).

[77] A. Escalante, ‘Gender nihilism: an anti-manifesto’, 2016, <https://libcom.org/library/gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto>, accessed 13.04.2021. For examples of the incorporation of trans into intersectional feminist agendas, see: R. Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (London, 2017), p. 181; L. Olufemi, Feminism, interrupted: disrupting power (London, 2020), p. 6.

[78] J. Twist, B. Vincent, M. Barker, and K. Gupta (eds.), ‘Introduction’ to Non-binary lives: an anthology of intersecting identities (London, 2020), pp. 19-20.

[79] LJ, ‘Who needs gender?’, in Non-binary lives, pp. 63-9.

 

‘Vermin and Devil-Worshippers’: Exploring Witch Identities in Popular Print in Early Modern Germany and England

Download PDF

Author Biography

Natalie Grace is a History PhD student at the University of Nottingham researching witchcraft in print in Germany and England. She is funded by the Midlands4Cities DTP and supervised by Dr David Gehring and Dr Simone Laqua-O’Donnell.

Twitter: @Witchy_Nat

Midlands4Cities VPP: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/student_profile/natalie-grace/

Abstract

This paper compares the creation of witch identities in news reports about witchcraft printed in Germany and England (1560 – 1650). The scale of witch-hunts and witchcraft reports differed dramatically in Germany and England. This difference, however, masks similarities in the created identities of witches in both countries. Both sometimes overlooked male witches, a decision shaped by reporters’ need to engage readers with sensational stories. Witch identities in both countries were always fluid, although this fluidity was especially evident during periods of intense witch-hunting. Ultimately, a diabolic connection and evil nature were the defining characteristics of witches in both Germany and England. In portraying the witch as a diabolic other – as ‘vermin and devil-worshippers’ – the pamphleteers in Germany and England created an enemy against whom Christian readers could unite.

Keywords: witchcraft, Germany, England, early modern, identity, sex, gender, crime, news, popular print, diabolism

‘Vermin and Devil-Worshippers’: Exploring Witch Identities in Popular Print in Early Modern Germany and England

Who, or what, is a witch? Belief in witches and witchcraft can be found, in some form, throughout history across the globe.[1] Yet a scholarly consensus on what exactly defines a witch remains elusive. Even contemporaries during the early modern European witch-hunts – which claimed the lives of roughly 45,000 people between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries – struggled to find a coherent definition of a witch.[2] The difference of opinion was not a simple separation between so-called ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ thinking. Rather, ideas about witches and witchcraft varied significantly at every level of society. Historians have long been interested in untangling the complex web of meanings surrounding witchcraft, but extant sources pose a problem when trying to explore the identity of the witches themselves. Even witches’ confessions, recorded in trial documents and news reports in the first person, are not unmediated windows on their thoughts and feelings.[3] Trial records are full of silences. Since questions were not often recorded, identifying leading questions and when the questioner has shaped the answers is challenging. Records of trials, whether they be court documents or news reports, often underwent significant editing, translation, and shaping to present a coherent narrative.[4] Some scholars argue that, by seeking signs of resistance in the records, it is possible to identify some semblance of the witch’s own ideas and agency.[5] This article, however, explores how the identity of the witch was constructed and created by others – namely, the writers and printers of witchcraft news reports.

This article examines such reports about witchcraft, from Germany and England, between 1560 and 1650. The witch-hunts in Germany and England could both be considered exceptional for different reasons. Germany – or, more properly, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation – has been dubbed ‘the heartland of the witch craze’ and ‘the mother of witches’: approximately 25,000 people were executed for the crime of witchcraft there.[6] The picture in England was different: around 1000 people were tried, and approximately 500 executed by hanging.[7] For some scholars, the comparatively mild approach to witch-hunting, and what they view as a lack of popular acceptance of the diabolic nature of witchcraft – that is, the notion that witches’ power was derived from making a pact with the Devil and Devil-worship marked England out as distinct from mainland Europe.[8] Of course, the suggestion that either was exceptional implies that there were norms of witch-hunting in other parts of Europe, but decades of detailed witchcraft research demonstrate that every country and region had its own idiosyncrasies in its approaches to witch-hunting. While the scale of witch-hunting differed considerably in Germany and England, the two countries also shared several characteristics. Both experienced significant religious upheaval, because of the Reformation. They also experienced significant political upheaval in the form of civil strife and warfare, including the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe (1618 – 1648) and the British Civil Wars (1642 – 1651).[9]  As will become clear in this paper, these periods of conflict coincided with significant witch-hunts in the respective countries. Both also had vibrant print industries. In England, this industry was concentrated primarily (although not solely) in London, while in Germany several print centres emerged including Augsburg, Nuremberg, Erfurt, Leipzig, and Cologne. These print centres, coupled with developments in communication networks, and cheaper production of paper, led to a growing popular print industry by the second half of the sixteenth century.[10]

The news reports on witchcraft discussed here were part of this wider growth in print. More specifically, they belong to the genre of crime reporting, alongside reports of other lurid and serious crimes such as murder. They were printed in the form of short pamphlets (approximately eight pages), chapbooks, single-sheet broadsheets, and ballads. Such documents often claimed to be ‘truthful’ (wahrhaftig) and ‘authentic’ (glaubwürdig), but they were not objective factual reports.[11] Rather, they were literary constructions, moulded by their authors (who were, in most cases, anonymous) to appeal to their readers and to present certain perspectives. Such representation was only indirectly related to actual events; pamphlets and ballads tended to report only the most sensational and atypical cases because they were likely to attract buyers.[12] It should not be assumed, therefore, that these accounts are simply reflections of existing ideas. The value of these sources for studying witchcraft in Germany has been demonstrated by Wolfgang Behringer, Harald Sipek, Ursula-Maria Krah, Robert Walinski-Kiehl, and Abaigéal Warfield.[13] Similar arguments have been made by Barbara Rosen, Marion Gibson, Carla Suhr, James Sharpe, and Charlotte-Rose Millar regarding witchcraft in England.[14] Witch news reports were accessible to a wider audience than the learned treatises that have often been the focus of witchcraft research; they were cheaper, shorter, and often illustrated or written with a tune to be sung aloud, ensuring that their message could be disseminated beyond the literate elite. They offer, therefore, the opportunity to explore what the wider populace learned about witchcraft. Millar has recently demonstrated the importance of these sources for exploring witch identities, offering an insight into male witches in English witchcraft pamphlets and highlighting the need for diabolism to be integrated into our understanding of English witchcraft.[15]

While this essay echoes Millar’s conclusions, it goes further by closely comparing German and English witch identities. Such comparison has not been undertaken previously. Comparative research remains rare in witchcraft scholarship, despite notable studies including the works of Johannes Dillinger, Laura Stokes, and Louise Nyholm Kallestrup demonstrating the merits of the approach.[16] Historiographical reviews of both English and German witchcraft note the potential for comparative work to yield new insights.[17]  This study provides convincing evidence for commonalities between German and English witch identities, while acknowledging and explaining differences. In doing so, it deepens our understanding of witchcraft in both countries, provides a framework to consider overarching trends in a way that is not possible with regional case studies, and highlights the potential of comparative research in the field of witchcraft. It asks what characteristics pamphleteers in both countries considered to be quintessential to the witch. It also considers how the genre of crime reporting and the intentions and priorities of pamphleteers shaped their approach to witch identities.

The essay is divided into four parts. Part one investigates pamphleteers’ approach to sex and gender, aspects of witch identity central in the historiography; part two considers how the need for sensational and shocking stories influenced the choices made by pamphleteers, and compares a sensational case that was reported in both countries; part three looks at the wider witch identity and considers the extent to which the identity broke down during times of intense witch-hunting; finally, part four shows the centrality of diabolism and evil nature in the witch identity, and argues that the moralistic and religious tone of the pamphlets explains their emphasis on these characteristics. Ultimately, the essay demonstrates that, while they are not identical, there are clear overlaps in the witch identities created by German and English pamphleteers.

What the Devil cannot do himself he does through an old woman’: Sex and Gender in Witchcraft Reports

In Germany and England, the female criminal was an anomaly, although the percentage of men and women prosecuted varied in different localities. According to Jeanette Kamp, some major European cities such as London, Leiden, and Glasgow had relatively high proportions of female criminals (30 to 50 percent), but others, such as Frankfurt am Main, had a much lower rate of female prosecution (22 percent).[18] Nevertheless, the majority of those who were officially prosecuted were men.[19] Men and women were also traditionally accused of different crimes. Men were the chief offenders in major crimes including treason, heresy, and murder. Women tended to be involved in crimes which undermined public order, such as slander, scolding, sexual impropriety, or property offences.[20] Two serious crimes, however, were closely associated with women: infanticide and witchcraft. In England, 90 percent of those executed for witchcraft were women.[21] In Germany, the figure was closer to 80 percent, although this masks significant regional variations across the Empire.[22]

The connection between witches and women has prompted much debate. In the 1960s and ‘70s, second-wave feminists viewed the witch as evidence of the longstanding oppression of women by patriarchal structures. Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly argued that the witch-hunts were ‘gynocide’, claimed erroneously that the hunts cost the lives of nine million women, and suggested that the high proportion of widows and spinsters among the accused is evidence that witch-hunts targeted women ‘whose crime [was] independence’.[23] These claims have been criticised for their ahistorical use of terms such as misogyny and patriarchy, neglect of archival evidence, and their refusal to treat male witches as a worthy subject of investigation.[24] They did, however, highlight the need to investigate relationships across sex, gender, and witchcraft properly. Subsequent explorations have added depth and nuance to our understanding of the connections.[25] Significant work has been done to integrate male witches and masculinities into discussions.[26] Considerations of gender and witchcraft also increasingly emphasise the need to move away from simple binaries, and to explore ‘how and to what extent gender was intrinsic to the identity of the witch’.[27]

Julian Goodare suggests that different ideas about witches and women existed at learned and popular levels.[28] Because witchcraft news reports appealed to both learned and popular audiences, it is worth considering how they navigated the relationship between witchcraft and women. The majority of German and English news reports published between 1560 and 1650 solely discuss female witches. Woodcut illustrations – important because they communicated ideas to illiterate or semi-literate audiences – feature primarily women. The Examination and Confession of Certaine Witches (1566), for example, which warned its readers about ‘feminine dames […] whom sathan hath infect’, included depictions of each of the three women who feature in the text.[29] Another, A Rehearsall Both Straung and True (1579), contains two depictions of women feeding animals or alongside demon-like creatures.[30] In Germany, the title page of A Truthful Report from the Town of Osnabrück (1588) shows a woman, whose crooked stance and supporting stick gives her an aged appearance, reaching out to a scaly, horned creature, presumably the Devil.[31] The image bears a resemblance to the woodcut showing a woman and the Devil embracing in Ulrich Molitor’s Of Witches and Diviner Women (first published 1489), indicating perhaps that printers took inspiration in their depictions of witches from learned treatises.[32] Another German woodcut, on the title page of A Truthful Report Concerning Wicked Witches (1571) shows four women, naked or barely dressed, with long flowing hair, gathered around a cooking pot with bones strewn on the ground around them.[33] The nakedness, loose hair, and the cooking pot are all symbols which Charles Zika suggests represented the connection between witchcraft and women in art during the late fifteenth century.[34] These features once again indicate that ideas about witches and women from other learned sources were adopted and disseminated in these pamphlets. The connection between witches and women is not restricted to visual imagery. It is sometimes explicitly stated in the text. Several German reports from the late 1570s and early 1580s, for example, include the phrase ‘as the old saying goes, what the devil cannot do himself, he does through an old woman’.[35] This statement, presented as received wisdom, implies that writers were simply reflecting a popular notion that old women were in league with the Devil and were, therefore, archetypal witches.

Yet it is important not to take such statements at face value. Some pamphleteers appear to have actively curated an image of the witch as exclusively female, disregarding the facts of the events that they were reporting. Of the 72 reports surveyed for this paper, 24 (thirteen English and eleven German) include references to men accused of or executed for the crime of witchcraft. In some cases, however, male witches are relatively downplayed or overlooked. The clearest example is two English pamphlets from 1579 discussing a trial in Windsor. The first is A Rehearsall Straung and True. This pamphlet names ‘fower notorious witches’ on its title page: Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, and Mother Margaret.[36] The text provides the testimony of Elizabeth Stile, who begins by naming other witches. The first name she gives is Father Rosimond.[37] Father Rosimond reappears later in Elizabeth’s confession, as she describes meeting with the other witches to perform ‘heinous and vilanous practices’: he is, once again, the first person she names.[38] A Brief Treatise Containing the Most Strange and Horrible Cruelty of Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham and her Confederates (1579) discusses the same events. It is written by Richard Galis, an apparent first-hand victim of the witches. Galis also refers to Father Rosimond. He describes seeking Father Rosimond’s advice about suspected sorcery and witchcraft, indicating that Father Rosimond acted as a cunning man.[39] Galis reports that Elizabeth named ‘diverse men as well as women, that used to do much harm by sorcery, witchcraft, and enchantments.’[40] In both pamphlets, however, Elizabeth’s naming of Father Rosimond as a witch is downplayed in the overall narrative. The pamphlets inform readers that Elizabeth and three other women that she named were executed, but Father Rosimond’s fate remains unclear. Galis’s choice of language makes his position clear. He talks of how the ‘sisters’ gathered to perform their sorcery – a gathering at which Elizabeth states Father Rosimond was present – and, in his conclusion, warns his readers about the ‘daughters of the devil’.[41] The reader is left with the distinct impression that witches are women.

A similar technique can be observed in a German pamphlet – A True and Authentic Report: How 225 Women were Burned in the Year 1582 – which reported numerous witch trials in the south of the Empire. The word choice in the title is significant. The writer used the German Weiber which translates as ‘women’ or, alternatively, ‘hags’.[42] Different terms which include both men and women, such as Unholden (fiends), appear in other German pamphlet titles.[43] The choice of Weiber here suggests that the author of this pamphlet wanted to place emphasis on the fact that the witches were female despite the fact that within the text there are scattered references to male witches. Indeed, the report states that ‘44 women and three men’ were captured and burned in the county of Montbéliard.[44] It also mentions a male sorcerer (Hexenmeister) in Colmar.[45] At the end of the report, however, the author warns of Satan’s power over ‘his weak instruments of the female sex’.[46] Evidently, this pamphlet’s author felt that sex was a defining component of witch identity. In both English and German sources, then, there is a clear emphasis on female witches and male witches’ roles are downplayed. Why exactly did pamphleteers in both countries choose to emphasise female witches in this way?

‘The most monstrous act that ever man heard of’: Sensationalism and shock in the shaping of witch identities

The attention given to female witches can be explained, at least partially, by the conventions of the crime reporting genre to which these sources belong. Alongside claims to be ‘truthful’, reports emphasise the shocking nature of their stories using terms like ‘wonderful’, ‘strange’, and ‘terrifying’.[47] The juxtaposition of truth and shock leads Warfield to characterise such sources as ‘a forerunner for our own modern-day fascination with “true crime” series and documentaries’.[48] Attention-grabbing headlines ensured the purchase of the pamphlet in an increasingly competitive market; put another way, they were the early modern equivalent of ‘clickbait’. Andrew Pettegree suggests that there was ‘a particular fascination with the crimes of women […] because they were so rare’.[49] Several scholars have noted that the audience for such cheap print was ‘socially variegated’ and ‘assumed a broad social consensus of shared values’.[50] Yet the people most likely to purchase these documents, especially in the earlier years of the period examined here – and the audience, therefore, that printers were particularly seeking to entice – were ‘the literate upper levels of early modern society.’[51] For members of this stratum of society who had achieved some level of security and comfort, news pamphlets like these witchcraft reports ‘spoke to [their] deepest fears of attacks on established social and gender hierarchies.’[52] Reporting on witchcraft offered an ideal opportunity for pamphleteers and printers to tap into the market for dramatic tales of women who had contravened societal norms, which may go some way to explaining why writers chose to only mention female witches in the titles of their pamphlets in the examples above. Criminal women were more sensational than criminal men, and the reports on such women nurtured the anxieties of upper-class men who sought to maintain their positions within the social order.

The role of sensationalism in moulding the witch identities in these reports is illustrated by the fact that, where male witches do feature prominently, the stories were especially sensational and shocking. Both German and English reports discussing male witches accuse them of a litany of dreadful crimes. The English pamphlet discussing Lewis Gaufredy, a French priest who was convicted for witchcraft, emphasises his duplicitousness and how he used his diabolic powers to seduce and rape women.[53] A German pamphlet reporting the prosecution of a family of witches, but primarily focusing on the men in the family, accused them not only of witchcraft, but also multiple counts of murder, theft, and arson.[54] The case of Peter Stumpf, who was executed in Bedburg near Cologne in 1589, is particularly sensational. Alongside sorcery, Stumpf was accused of child-murder, incestuous rape, and cannibalism. His crimes obviously captured the European imagination. Alongside four surviving German reports, his story was translated and printed in Dutch, Danish, and English.[55] The English version, printed in London in 1590, claims to be a translation from a German copy, but does not match any of the extant versions.[56] The survival rate for such ephemeral literature is extremely low, so it is possible that the source text for the translation has simply not survived. It is, however, also plausible that the author simply claimed it was a translation to lend legitimacy to the account, a common tactic when reporting foreign news.[57]

The survival of German and English examples of this case offers a rare opportunity to directly compare witch reporting and the creation of witch identities in the two countries. The extant German copies are three broadsheets (all written in verse) and one pamphlet; the English version is a pamphlet.[58] There are some similarities across the five sources. All report Stumpf’s crimes, including the murder of thirteen children, eating his son’s brain, and sleeping with his daughter. All proclaim the incredible nature of the tale: one German broadsheet talks of Stumpf’s ‘unspeakable shame and vice’, while another claims his story is ‘too terrifying to hear’; the English pamphlet reports that Stumpf ‘did more mischeefe and cruelty then would be credible, although high Germany hath been forced to talke the truth thereof.’[59] Both the German and the English texts give the impression that Stumpf was, in a twisted way, a celebrity. One of the broadsheets is written from Stumpf’s own perspective, offering a vicarious insight into the imagined mindset of a serial killer.[60] The English version describes him as a ‘most wicked sorcerer’.[61] According to Sara Barker, focusing the story on a central character was a common technique in news reporting, allowing the reader to create a personal connection.[62]

There are, however, some differences. As Warfield has observed, the English version is far more detailed than any of the German accounts.[63] Comparing the German pamphlet with the English one, the German account spends just two of eight pages discussing Stumpf, before moving on to discuss witch trials happening elsewhere.[64] The English pamphlet devotes nineteen pages solely to discussing Stumpf, providing far more detail about his life, his deeds, failed attempts to capture him, and his final demise. The English pamphlet is particularly hyperbolic in its descriptions of Stumpf: he is ‘a most wicked sorcerer’, he lusted after his daughter ‘most unnaturally, and cruelly committed most wicked incest with her’, and the murder and cannibalisation of his son was ‘the most monstrous act that ever man heard of.’[65]

The extra detail provided in the English report may partially be to aid the reliability of the report, given the foreign origins of the tale. Yet this level of detail and hyperbole is also found in other English witch reports examined for this paper. Similar exaggerations are found in the news ballad from 1628 reporting the murder of Doctor Lambe, an associate of the Duke of Buckingham who was widely believed to be a sorcerer: the ballad describes him as ‘the Devill of our nation’ and states that ‘such a wicked wretch/in England hath liv’d seldom’.[66] These hyperbolic descriptions are not reserved for male witches. In Thomas Potts’s report on the witches of Lancaster, published in 1613, he describes the witchcraft performed there by both male and female witches as ‘the most barbarous and damnable practices’, and labels one of the accused witches, Elizabeth Demdike, as ‘the most dangerous and malitious witch’.[67] Another early English report from 1592 is titled A Most Wicked Worke of a Wretched Witch (the like whereof none can record these manie yeeres in England.).[68] The length of English witch reports is also notable. While the vast majority of the German reports examined for this paper were between eight and sixteen pages long, the length of the English reports varies considerably. It is not uncommon for English witch reports to devote several pages to the description of each individual witch’s character and misdeeds.[69]

The differences between the German and English pamphlets discussing the Stumpf case are, therefore, indicative of a wider difference between German and English witch reports, and one which has a significant impact on the way they treat witch identities and construct sensational stories: scale. In the German version, Stumpf is a case that, while admittedly notable because of his sex and the severity of his crimes, is one of multiple cases of witchcraft across the Empire. The discussion is, therefore, fairly brief. Most German pamphlets report the trials and executions of multiple witches in different regions; they do not tend to focus heavily on individuals’ motivations and lives, but instead emphasise the widespread devastation and threat posed by the witches collectively. The sensationalism which printers needed to sell their stories comes, in these instances, from the extensive and growing nature of the problem. English witch reports, by contrast, tend to report on only one trial in a particular locality and, consequently, they spend more time discussing the individuals involved in the trials. The sensationalism in these reports is more tied to individuals’ failures to conform to societal norms. As a result, the individual witch identity appears more important and more stable in the English pamphlets than it does in the German reports. Yet what characteristics formed part of this identity, and how far were these identities truly fixed in either country?

‘Men and women, young and old, poor and rich’: Breakdown of the Witch Identity

Thus far this article has explored gendering and sensationalism in print. Sex and the gendering of witch identity have dominated historical discussions. In examining the pamphlets, it is clear that they are also the individual characteristics that both English and German witch pamphlets most commonly make reference to: even if German sources discuss large groups of witches, the gendering of the language chosen gives some indication as to the sex of the witches. Historians have, however, highlighted that witch identities were multifaceted.[70]  Historians of both German and English witchcraft have, for example, noted a high proportion of old women among the accused.[71] In many cases, the specific age of the witch is not mentioned in the pamphlets examined for this paper. Yet often when age is mentioned the accused is notably old. A New Report from Bernburg (1580), for example, discusses ‘three old women’, one of whom was 90 years old.[72] Another German account discussing a witch and a Jesuit claims that the witch was 73 years old.[73] In England, Elizabeth Stile – discussed above – was 65 years old.[74] In The Apprehension and Confession of Three Notorious Witches (1589), the only person whose age is recorded is Joan Cunney (80 years old).[75] According to Raisa Maria Toivo, descriptions of witches as old, poor, or lame ‘may have been made to fit the popular notion of how a witch should be rather than a genuinely accurate portrayal.’[76] The way that pamphleteers provide information about the age of the accused when they are particularly old, and are silent on the ages of other witches, supports Toivo’s suggestion that such sources created an idea of what witches ought to have been (in the eyes of the intended audience) rather than simply reflecting reality.

Poverty is another characteristic mentioned by Toivo. This characteristic is also not mentioned by pamphleteers as frequently as sex or gender, but some English pamphlets do draw a clear connection between poverty, lack of education, and witchcraft, as The Witches of Northamptonshire (1612) demonstrates. The author states that those tempted into witchcraft are ‘of the meanest, and the basest sort both in birth and breeding, so are they the most uncapable of any instruction to the contrary’.[77] One witch, Agnes Brown, is described as ‘of poore parentage and poorer education’; another, Arthur Bill, is labelled ‘a wretched, poor man, both in state and mind.’[78] Perhaps because of the differences in scale of the events they are describing, the German pamphlets do not emphasise poverty in the same way. More often, German reports state that witches were ‘poor and rich’.[79] References to rich, handsome, and stately witches can also be found in several German pamphlets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.[80] These examples indicate that the German witch identity was broader and more malleable that its English counterpart.

While the witch identity in Germany seems to have been comparatively flexible, some German witchcraft historians have suggested that the stereotype broke down entirely during so-called witch panics.[81] This argument was first made by Hans Christian Erik Midelfort, who focused on the increased number of men among the accused during the large-scale witch-hunts in the southern parts of the Empire in the 1610s and 1620s.[82] The reports published in these decades evoke paranoia and fear in their characterisation of witches. One from 1616 states that ‘men and women, young and old, poor and rich, have been executed and burned because of their witchcraft and sorcery’.[83] Similar sentiments are found in the Certain Account of Witch Burnings in the Territory of Bamberg (1628), which describes how ‘gentlemen as well as women’ were burned, and claims that ‘many are arrested daily […] rich, poor, beautiful, men, and women.’[84] A year earlier, A True and Thorough Report from the Bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg (1627), warned that anyone could be a witch. The pamphlet opens by lamenting the discovery of ‘many witch men and women’ (vil Hexen Mann und Weib) and explains that  family members could not be certain about whether their relatives were witches.[85] It lists the professions of several witches, including a grocer (ein Kramer), a butcher (ein Metzger), a tanner (ein Gerber), and a schoolmaster (ein Schulmeister).[86]  Taken together, these pamphlets appear to reflect a change in the witch stereotype because pamphleteers specifically emphasised the diverse characteristics of those accused of witchcraft, rather than isolating particular traits.

England never experienced witch-hunts on the same scale as those in Germany. There was, nevertheless, a peak in witch-hunting during the 1640s due to a breakdown of law linked to the British Civil Wars and the zealous witch-hunting of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne.[87] 100 people were executed in the East Anglia trials, carried out by Hopkins and Stearne in Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk between 1645 and 1647; this figure amounts to a fifth of the total witchcraft executions in England across the early modern period.[88] During these trials, witch reports also reflect a shift in witch identities away from the old, poor, ill-educated woman. More male witches feature in pamphlets published during this decade than any other time.[89] One 1643 report begins by stating that ‘many are in a belief, that this silly sex of women can by no means attaine to that so vile and damned a practise of sorcery, and Witch-craft, in regard of their illiteratenesse and want of learning, which many men have by great learning done.’[90] That the author deemed it necessary to justify the existence of female witches suggests there has been a significant change in thought about what witchcraft is and who can perform it. Another pamphlet, printed in 1645, lists the trials of several groups of witches in various parts of England including Norfolk and Suffolk. This pamphlet, commenting on numerous trials, is more in keeping with the German style of witch reporting than the English, an indication of the shift in scale of witch-hunting in England.[91] In one of the cases reported in this pamphlet, the witch is not an impoverished old woman but is instead described as ‘a gentlewoman or a great lady’.[92]

How far do these examples truly represent a breakdown of the witch stereotype? As Alison Rowlands notes, male witches exist outside major witch-panics; similarly, many other characteristics highlighted in the examples from the 1610s and 20s are present in earlier reports.[93] It may be unusual to see so many varied characteristics side-by-side as they are in the German reports from the 1610s and 20s, but the potential for the broader witch identity is arguably present throughout the reports, as illustrated above. When the wider corpus of German witch reports is considered, the witch stereotype – that is, the idea that the witch identity was largely fixed and narrowly defined as an old, poor, socially-isolated woman – seems to be an illusion. This period represents, rather than a breakdown of the stereotype, an intensification of the enduring flexibility of the German witch identity. Scholars of English witchcraft have expressed similar misgivings about the extent to which the trials of the 1640s can be truly considered atypical. Sharpe argues that, in fact, ‘the alleged witches […] were firmly in the English mainstream’, and Millar agrees that while the period was unusual it did not include anything that had not previously appeared in witchcraft print.[94] The broader witch identities shown in the 1640s English pamphlets are arguably an amalgamation of the possible identities that appear in earlier pamphlets. One of the earliest English pamphlets, published in 1566, features a man accused of witchcraft and argues that ‘not onely simple people have been falsely seduced and superstitiously led’, foreshadowing the emphasis on learned and elite individuals seen in the 1640s pamphlets.[95]

Close analysis of the witch reports from both countries indicates, therefore that the periods of crisis in each respective country unlocked the potential, which had always been present, for flexible witch identities. While some individual characteristics were more closely associated with witchcraft at certain points or in certain reports, the association was not consistent over time. The lack of consensus on which individual characteristics were synonymous with witchcraft that emerges in these pamphlets is actually logical. The ambiguity of the witch is a significant factor in its power to inspire fear. By failing to tie the witch to any one group of society, the news reports contribute to the sense that witchcraft was ever-present and posed a significant threat to all. The role of fear in shaping witch identities explains why they were at their most flexible at times of heightened anxiety about witchcraft. The adaptability of the witch identity is perhaps more obvious in the German reports because of their tendency to focus on several trials at once, meaning individual pamphlets can reflect a diverse range of individuals accused of witchcraft. Individual English pamphlets may create the illusion of a fixed witch identity, but by considering the corpus as a whole, it becomes clear that the situation was more complex.

A witch is one that worketh by the Devil’: Diabolic Identities

Although German and English witch reports did not link witches to one social group, comparison shows that there was a characteristic which pamphleteers in both countries considered quintessential to the witch identity: the witch’s connection with the Devil and their fundamentally evil nature. The connection between witchcraft, diabolism, and heresy is well-established in German scholarship. Imperial law, codified in the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina or Carolina Code (1532), distinguished between harmful and non-harmful magic and only punished the former with death.[96] In practice, however, territorial rulers across the Empire introduced their own legal codes concerning witchcraft. Laws introduced in the Electorate of Saxony in 1572, for example, stated that sorcery was forbidden in the Bible and that ‘those who make a pact with the devil – even if they harm no one with their sorcery – must be executed by fire’.[97] In England, the exact connection between diabolism, witchcraft, and heresy is disputed. Like the Carolina Code, the Elizabethan Witchcraft Act (1563) distinguished between those who performed harmful and non-harmful magic, punishing the former with death on their second offence.[98] The act refers to the existence of ‘many fantasticall and devilishe persons’ but does not specifically link witchcraft with devil-worship.[99] The Jacobean Witchcraft Act (1604) called for ‘more severe punishing’ and removed the distinction between harmful and non-harmful magic.[100] This act mentions consulting with evil and wicked spirits but stops short of placing diabolism at the centre of witchcraft.[101] Clive Holmes suggests that the courts were primarily concerned with ‘harm rather than heresy’, a distinction which seems to suggest significant difference between German and English conceptions of witchcraft.[102]

Recently, however, scholars including Millar and Sharpe have used witchcraft pamphlets to argue that the centrality of diabolism to popular English witch beliefs needs to be re-examined. Sharpe suggests that Christina Larner’s notion of a ‘popular demonic’, the development of well-rooted popular demonology in Scotland, can also be found in England.[103] Millar argues that understanding the role played by diabolism in English witchcraft is key to incorporating male witches into the broader paradigm, because both male and female witches were ultimately defined by their relationship with demonic familiars (a spirit – often in the form of a domestic animal – that made a bond with the witch and did their bidding).[104] The pamphlets certainly draw a clearer connection between the Devil and witchcraft than the statutes. A True and Just Recorde (1582) offers a particularly stark example: the author is openly critical of the leniency of English law, describing witches as ‘that hellish liverie’ and labelling witchcraft ‘a devilish and damnable practice.’[105] They praise ‘magistrates of forren lands’ for treating witchcraft with the severity it deserves.[106] Gibson has noted that this pamphlet is unusual because it specifically draws on ideas from mainland Europe.[107] Yet it is far from the only English pamphlet to consider witchcraft tantamount to heresy and devil-worship. The Witches of Northamptonshire (1612), for instance, offers this definition of witchcraft:

‘A witch is one that worketh by the Devill, or by some Devillish or Curious act, either hurting or healing, revealing things secret, or foretelling things to come, which the Devill hath devised to entangle, and to snare men’s souls withal unto damnation.’[108]

These ideas are remarkably similar to German reports which frequently label witches as ‘devil-worshippers’, the ‘devil’s servants’, or ‘instruments of the Devil’. The connection to the Devil is more explicit in the German reports, often featuring descriptions of meetings between the Devil and groups of witches. Such meetings with the Devil in human form are rare in English pamphlets outside of 1645-50, although the familiar arguably performs a similar role. Additionally, a similar providential explanation for witches’ power exists in German and English reports. In Germany, Lutz’s Concerning Wicked Witches outlines the hierarchy within which witches operate. The hierarchy is as follows: the primary cause of misfortune in God, who permits; the secondary cause is Satan, who brings the misfortune about; the third is the witches, who consent and cooperate with Satan.[109] An analogous explanation of witches’ power is found in the English The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1619), which states that ‘divers impious and facinorous [i.e. extremely wicked] mischiefs have been effectuated through the instruments of the Diuell, by the permission of God.’[110]

Clearly, then, not only are Millar and Sharpe correct in their identification of diabolism in English witchcraft pamphlets, but this comparative study demonstrates that there are evident parallels in the characterisation of witches and their connection with the Devil in England and Germany. These resemblances can also be seen in the German and English witch reports’ emphasis on the evil and disruptive nature of the witch. Many English witches are portrayed as outsiders, disliked by their community and driven by revenge. An early English report, for example, describes the examination and confession of three women accused of witchcraft: Elizabeth Francis, Agnes Waterhouse, and Joan Waterhouse.[111] Elizabeth and Agnes are both described as living ‘unquietly’ with their respective spouses, and confess to disposing of their husbands with Satan’s aid; Agnes and Joan both confess to using their witchcraft to take revenge on neighbours who had refused them charity.[112] These descriptions are typical of the deviant quality associated with witches in the English sources. Although the German pamphlets focus more on groups of witches rather than individuals, their wickedness and evil nature is unmistakable. Several pamphlets discuss the witches’ plots to harm and kill people. The idea that witches particularly target babies, new mothers, and older people – presented in many pamphlets including the Expanded Witch Report (1590) – serves to emphasise their implicit wickedness because of their decision to target the weak, innocent, and most vulnerable members of society.[113] Johannes Dillinger suggests that, rather than seeking commonalities in the social characteristics of those accused of witchcraft, scholars should consider that the individual’s reputation for conflict or disruption was the key to their identification as a witch: he terms this the ‘Evil People Paradigm’.[114] A similar argument has been put forward by Rowlands, who argues that the idea of the witch as a ‘bad neighbour’ is ‘a more useful conceptual category than that of the masculine or feminine “other”’.[115] Comparison of English and German witch reports supports the validity of these arguments, suggesting that a person’s moral background and bad nature were central to the witch identity in both countries.

The notion of a diabolic, wholly evil sect was undoubtedly shocking, and as sensationalism has been emphasised throughout the printed works examined here, it is probable that this factor played some role in the ways that witches were characterised. Yet, while sensationalism was important to engage readers, the role of these pamphlets was not merely to entertain. It is unlikely that anyone could have to survived solely on profits made from writing these news pamphlets; it is also unlikely, therefore, that such pamphlets were written purely for commercial gain.[116] Why, then, were these pamphlets written, and how does this influence their construction of witch identities? Several scholars have noted that crime pamphlets, including witchcraft reports, were moralistic and didactic, bearing a close resemblance to sermons in the way that the stories they reported had a clear moral message for their readers.[117] This moral purpose is crucial to understanding the focus of the pamphleteers. These pamphlets did not simply seek to report events, but also to instruct their readers on sinful behaviour, to remind them of the cosmic struggle between God and his foes, and to exhort them to good Christian living.[118] The German and English witch pamphlets often contain laments about sin, other crimes, and the state of the world, and commonly conclude with calls to God to protect them against the ‘tricks and wiles of the Devil and his followers’.[119] The witches are portrayed as a threatening infestation; such ideas are neatly encapsulated in the Expanded Witch Report, which claims that ‘nearly every city, market, and town in all of Germany […] is full of these vermin and devil-worshippers’.[120] Similar rhetoric can be found in an English pamphlet which describes how God ‘weeds [the witches] out in every cell they lurke’.[121] Witch pamphlets in both Germany and England ultimately construct witch identities in a very similar way, with the diabolic connections and evil nature of the witch at the centre of their identity. In doing so, the pamphleteers construct the witch as a wholly evil, diabolic other, acting as a foil for the good Christian readers to whom they appealed and sought to influence.

Conclusion

This article has explored the creation and shaping of witch identities in German and English witch reports from 1560 to 1650. The topic is challenging and complex, making it impossible to cover every aspect of the witch identity sufficiently here. Many other areas would benefit from further exploration. It would be interesting, for example, to examine how the pamphlets in the two countries explained the act of becoming a witch; is it innate, inherited, or learned? Linking to the notion that witchcraft could be inherited, there is also significant scope to explore the notion of the ‘witch family’, a concept discussed elsewhere and a recurring theme in the reports in both countries. Additionally, the role of reputation, briefly mentioned in this piece as it relates to an individual’s bad nature, could be considered in greater depth.

Nevertheless, this article offers the first comprehensive comparison of these German and English witch reports. This comparative approach offers new insights into commonalities and contrasts in English and German constructions of witch identities that had not previously been fully explored. To allow for sufficient and detailed comparison, it has limited its focus to the aspects of witch identity that have drawn the interest of witchcraft historians and emerge most clearly in the pamphlets from both countries. Undoubtedly, one of the most frequently discussed characteristics of the witch is their sex and gender. In this case, clear similarities emerge in both German and English witch reports. Although most witches prosecuted were women in both countries, part one above demonstrates that, even if male witches were present in the trials, pamphleteers in both countries chose to downplay their role and emphasise instead the feminine connection with witchcraft. This tendency to highlight female witches might have been influenced by the need for the pamphlets to catch the eye of their audience. As part two, and particularly the example of Peter Stumpf, illustrates, pamphleteers would put male witches front and centre in their narratives if the story was especially shocking or sensational. Once again, the idea that sensationalism was a driving force in the writing of witch reports applies to both German and English reports, although the Stumpf case and other English examples indicate that the English reports drew their sensationalism from individual actors more than the German sources did.

This observation draws attention to the differences in scope and scale of the German and English witch reports. These differences, on the surface, had a significant influence on the way that witch identities were presented in the two countries. German sources often discussed larger groups of witches or several different trials in one report; the broader scope of these reports meant that the witch identity emerging from individual reports was often fairly diverse, and not limited to a single social group. This diversity was especially evident during the peak of the trials in the south of the Empire during the 1610s and 20s, but this does not represent a total breakdown of the witch stereotype in German reports. Rather, the fear and anxiety that this period generated brought the diverse witch identities to the forefront of the pamphlets to a greater extent than previously, as pamphleteers sought to remind readers that anyone in their community could be a witch. The English witch reports, tending to focus on a small group of witches or on one isolated trial, give the initial impression of a stronger, fixed witch identity centred on impoverished old women. The reports published in the 1640s at first glance seem to represent a departure from this fixed stereotype. As in Germany, however, this period merely realised the potential for more diverse witch identities that had always been present in the English witch reports. The notion that anyone could be a witch was more threatening than was a more limited notion restricting the witch to a small section of society.

Ultimately, both German and English witch reports considered the same characteristics – a connection to the Devil and a wicked nature – to be definitive components of the witch identity. The diabolic connection is more explicit in the German reports which often feature the Devil as a character and include descriptions of the Devil meeting with witches. Nevertheless, scholars such as Millar and Sharpe are correct to highlight the diabolism present in English witchcraft reports. While diabolism may be more implicit than the German accounts, English witch reports frequently describe the witches and their actions as ‘devilish’. Both German and English reports offer similar explanations for the witches’ power, with God giving permission to the Devil to perform harm, who then employs his witches to wreak havoc. The witches in both countries are also presented as wicked or evil, although the way in which the pamphlets convey this idea differs in England and Germany. The reason for emphasising these wicked and devilish characteristics of the witches is clear in light of the purpose of these pamphlets. In portraying the witch as a diabolic other, as ‘vermin and devil-worshippers’, the pamphleteers in both Germany and England created an enemy against whom good Christian readers could unite.

 

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Printed primary sources

Note: Where available, bibliographical references have been provided to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) in England and the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD16) and the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD17) in Germany.

Anon., A Most Certain, Strange, and true Discovery of a Witch (London, 1643). [ESTC R4848]

Anon., A Rehearsall Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches apprehended at Winsore in the Countie of Berks. (London, 1579). [ESTC S101967]

Anon., A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter, a Most Wicked Sorcerer (London, 1590). [ESTC S101735]

Anon., ANNO MDLXXXVI. Ist bey Bedbur ein Zauberer geweßen STUMP PETER genant, welcher sich in einen WOLF verwandelt (s.l., 1589). [No VD16 Catalogue Number]

Anon., Augusten Hertzogen zu Sachsen … Verordnungen und Constitutionen des rechtlichen Process (Dresden, 1572).  [VD16 S 895]

Anon., Des allerdurchleuchtigsten, groszmechtigsten vnüberwindlichsten Keyser Karls des Fünfften, vnd des Heyligen Römischen Reichs peinlich Gerichts ordnung:auff den Reichßtägen zu Augspurg vnd Regenspurg, in jaren dreissig vnd zwey vnd dreissig gehalten, auffgericht vnd beschlossen (Frankfurt am Main, 1562) [VD16 D 1081]

Anon., Ein New kläglich Lied von dem grossen Schaden der Unholden So sie in Westphalen zu Aschenbruegk und andern Orten begangen haben in dem jetztwerenden 1583. Jar (Wesel, 1583). [VD16 ZV 11599]

Anon., Ein Warhafftige und gründliche Beschreibung Auß dem Bistumb Würtz und Bamberg Deßgleichen von dem ganzen Fränkischen Kraiß wie man alda so vil hexen Mann vnd Weibspersohnen verbrennen laßt (S.l., 1627). [No VD17 Catalogue Number]

Anon., Ein Warhafftige Zeitung Von etlichen Hexen oder Unholden welche man kürtzlich im Stifft Mäntz zu Ascheburg, Dipperck,Ostum, Rönßhoffen auch andern Orten verbrendt was Ubels sie gestifft und bekandt haben (Frankfurt am Main, 1603). [VD17 1:691858R]

Anon., En forskreckelig oc sand bescriffuelse om mange troldfolck som ere forbrends for deris misgierninger skyld fra det aar 1589 (Copenhagen, 1591).

Anon., Erweyterte Unholden-Zeitung: Kurze Erzelung wie viel der Unholden hin vnd wider/ sonderlich inn dem Obern Teutschland/ gefängklich eingezogen (Ulm, 1590). [VD16 E 3889]

Anon., Gewisser Bericht des Truten und Hexenbrennens Bambergischen Gebiets wie lang es gewehrt: Was für ubels ihrer Außsag nach sie viel Jahr hero an Menschen, Vihe, Früchten und andern verübet was allbereit verbrennet (Schmalkalden, 1628). [VD17 23:293541Q]

Anon., Newe Zeitung aus Berneburgk Schrecklich und abschewlich zu hoeren und zu lesen von dreyen alten Teuffels Bulerin Hexin oder Zauberinnen (s.l., 1580). [VD16 N 624]

Anon., Signes and Wonders from Heaven (London, 1645). [ESTC R232297]

Anon., The Apprehension and Confession of Three Notorious Witches. Arreigned and by Justice condemned and executed at Chelmes-forde, in the Countye of Essex, the 5. day of Iulye, last past. 1589 (London, 1589). [ESTC S119280]

Anon., The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex (London, 1566). [ESTC S2279]

Anon., The Examination, Confession, Triall, and Execution, of Joane Williford, Joan Cariden, and Jane Hott: who were executed at Feversham in Kent, for being witches, on Munday the 29 of September, 1645 (London, 1645). [ESTC R200303]

Anon., The Examination of John Walsh […] upon certayn interrogatories touchyng wytchcrafte and sorcerye (London, 1566) [ESTC S102100]

Anon., The Life and Death of Lewis Gaufredy (London, 1612). [ESTC S102950]

Anon., The Witches of Northamptonshire Agnes Browne. Ioane Vaughan. Arthur Bill. Hellen Ienkenson. Mary Barber. (London, 1612). [ESTC S115086]

Anon., The Wonderful Discouerie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, daughters of Ioan Flower neere Bever Castle (London, 1619). [ESTC S102363]

Anon., Warhaffte und glaubwirdige Zeytung. Wie man in diesem 1582. Jahr wol in die 200. und fuenff und zweyntzig Weiber verbrant hat (Strasbourg, 1582). [VD16 ZV 29564]

Anon., Warhafftige Newe Zeittung auß dem Land Westvahlen von der Stat Ossenbruck wie man da hat auff einen Tag 133. Unholden verbrendt (s.l., 1588). [VD16 W 337]

Anon., Warhafftige und erschreckliche Beschreibung, von einem Zauberer (Stupe Peter genandt) der sich zu einem Wehrwolff hat können machen (Cologne, 1589). [VD16 W 516]

Anon, Warhafftige unnd Erschreckliche Thatten und Handlungen der Lxiij. Hexen unnd Unholden, so zu Wisenstaig, mit dem Brandt gericht worden seindt (Launigen, 1563). [VD16 W 535]

Anon., Warhafftige und Wunderbarlich Newe Zeitung von einem Pauren der sich durch Zauberey des tags siben stund zu ainen Wolff verwandelt hat (Nuremberg, 1589). [No VD16 Catalogue Number]

Anon., Warhafftige und wunderbarliche Newe Zeitung von einem Bawren der sich durch Zauberey deß Tags siben stunnd zu einem Wolff verwandelt hat (Augsburg, 1589). [No VD16 Catalogue Number]

Anon., Witchcrafts, Strange and Wonderfull: Discovering the Damnable Practices of Seven Witches, against the lives of certaine noble personages, and others of this kingdome, as shall appeare in this lamentable history (London, 1635). [ESTC S92558]

Zwo erschreckliche und unerhörte Geschicht, welches in diesem XCCI Jar geschehen ist auff dem Brockersberg, dar sich ahn die hundert tausend Unholden oder Hexen versamlet (Cologne, 1596). [No VD16 Catalogue Number]

Anon., Zwo Hexenzeitung: Die Erste Auß dem Bisthumb Würtzburg, das ist Gründliche Erzehlung wie der Bishoff zu Würtzburg das Hexenbrennen im Franckenlande angefangen […] die Ander Auß dem Hertzogthumb Würtenburg wie der Hertzog zu Würtenberg in unterschiedlichen Stätten das Hexenbrennen auch angefangen (Tübingen, 1616). [VD17 23:626143G]

Anon., Zwo schröckliche Newe Zeitung, die erste ist von dem grewlichen Elendt, so sich in Aschenburck am Maynstrom von Hexen unnd Unholten geschehen (Giessen, 1612). [No VD17 Catalogue Number]

Anon., Zwo Warhafftige newe Zeitungen […] Die andere Zeitung: Eine abschewliche vnd zuuor nie erhoerte erschreckliche Zaubereyen Moerdt vnnd Diebereyen von Vater Mutter zweyen Soehnen vnd zweyen Toechtermaennern geschehen Welche in … Muenchen im Beyerland sind gefaenglich eingezogen worden (Basel, 1600). [VD16 ZV 21490]

  1. B, A most wicked worke of a wretched witch (the like whereof none can record these manie yeeres in England.) (London, 1592). [ESTC S119200]

Galis, R., A Brief Treatise Containing the Most Strange and Horrible Cruelty of Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham and her Confederates (London, 1579). [ESTC S124945]

Kuntz, H., Newe Zeitung von einer Erschrecklicher That, welche zu Dillingen, von einem Jhesuwider, vnd einer Hexen geschehen ist (Basel, 1579). [VD16 ZV 21532]

Kuntz, H., Newe Zeitung von einer Erschrecklicher That, welche zu Dillingen, von einem Jhesuwider, vnd einer Hexen geschehen ist (Urssel, 1580). [VD16 ZV 28968]

Lutz, R., Warhafftige Zeittung Von Gottlosen Hexen Auch Ketzerischen und Teuffels Weibern die zu Schettstadt deß H. Römischen Reichstadt in Elsaß auf den XXII. Herbstmonat deß 1570 Jahrs von wegen ihrer schändtlichen Teuffelsverpflichtung sind verbrennt (s.l, 1571). [VD16 L 7693]

Molitor, U., Von den Unholden oder Hexen (Augsburg, 1508). [VD16 M 5976]

Parker, M., The Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, / The great suposed Coniurer, who was wounded to death by Saylers / and other Lads, on Fryday the 14. of Iune, 1628. And dyed in the / Poultry Counter, neere Cheapside, on the Saturday morning following (London, 1628). [ESTC S126177]

Potts, T., The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster With the arraignement and triall of nineteene notorious witches (London, 16139). [ESTC S114979]

van Gehlenahlen III, J., Warachtighe ende verschrickelijcke beschryvinge van vele toovenaers, hoe ende waerom men die verbrandt heeft in 1589 (Antwerp, 1589).

  1. W., A True and Just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, Taken at St. Ofes in the Countie of Essex (London, 1582). [ESTC S101821]

Primary sources in edited collections

Statutes of the Realm. Volume 4, Part I (London, 1819).

‘An Act agaynst conjuracons inchantmentes and Witchecraftes (5 Eliz I, c. 16)’, pp. 446 – 7.

Statutes of the Realm. Volume 4, Part II (London, 1819).

‘An Act against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealing with evill and wicked Spirits (1 Jac. I, c. 12)’, pp. 1028 – 9.

Secondary Sources

Apps L., and A. C. Gow, Gender at the Stake: Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2003).

Barker, S. K., ‘International News Pamphlets’, in A Kesson and E. Smith (eds.), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2016), pp. 145 – 155.

Behringer, W., ‘Witchcraft and the Media’, in M. E. Plummer & R. B. Barnes (eds.), Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H. C. Erik Midelfort (Farnham, 2009), pp. 217 – 36.

Clark, S., Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (London, 2003).

Daly, M., Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, with a New Introduction by the author (London, 1991).

Dillinger, J., ‘Germany – “The Mother of the Witches”’, in J. Dillinger (ed.), The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London, 2020), pp. 94 – 118.

Dillinger, J., Hexen und Magie (2nd edn., Frankfurt am Main, 2018).

Dillinger, J., ‘Evil People’: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, trans. L. Stokes (Charlottesville, VA, 2009).

Droste, H., ‘How Public Was the News in Early Modern Times?’, in H. Droste & K. Salmi-Niklander (eds.), Handwritten Newspapers: An Alternative Medium during the Early Modern and Modern Periods (Helsinki, 2019), pp. 29 – 44.

Dworkin, A., Woman Hating (New York, NY, 1974).

Gaskill, M., ‘Witchcraft Trials in England’, in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), pp. 283 – 99.

Gaskill, M., ‘Witchcraft and Evidence in early modern England’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), pp. 33 – 70.

Gibson, M., ‘French demonology in an English village: the St Osyth experiment of 1582’, in J. Goodare, R. Voltmer & L. Helene Willumsen (eds.), Demonology and witch-hunting in early modern Europe (London, 2020), pp. 107 – 26.

Gibson, M., Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London, 1999).

Goodare, J., The European Witch-Hunt (London, 2016).

Holmes, C., ‘Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England’, in S. L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (New York, NY, 1984), pp. 85 – 112.

Hutton, R., The Witch: A History of Fear, From the Ancient Times to the Present (London, 2017).

Kallestrup, L. N., Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark (Basingstoke, 2015).

Kamp, J., Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main (Leiden 2019).

Kounine, L., Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2018).

Krah, U., ‘Fiktionalität und Faktizität in frühneuzeitlichen Kleinschriften (Einblattdrucke und Flugschriften)’, in K. Moeller & B. Schmidt (eds.), Realität und Mythos: Hexenverfolgung und Rezeptionsgeschichte (Hamburg, 2003), pp. 77 – 87.

Levack, B. P., The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (4th edn., London, 2016).

Midelfort, H. C. Erik, ‘Heartland of the Witchcraze: Central and Northern Europe’, History Today, 31/2 (1981), p. 27.

Midelfort, H. C. Erik, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562 – 1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, CA, 1972).

Millar, C., ‘Diabolic Men: Reintegrating Male Witches into English Witchcraft’, The Seventeenth Century (2020), pp. 1 – 21.

Millar, C., Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (London, 2017).

O Lynn, A. A., ‘Ghosts of War and Spirits of Place: Spectral Belief in Early Modern England and Protestant Germany’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 2018).

Pettegree, A., The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (London, 2014).

Robisheaux, T., ‘The German Witch Trials’ in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), pp. 179–98.

Roper, L, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (London, 2004).

Rosen, B., Witchcraft (London, 1969).

Rowlands, A., ‘Not the Usual Suspects? Male, Witchcraft, and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe’, in A. Rowlands (ed.), Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 1 – 30.

Rowlands, A., ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’, in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), pp. 449 – 67.

Schulte, R., Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, trans. L. Froome-Döring (Basingstoke, 2009).

Sharpe, J., ‘English Witchcraft Pamphlets and the Popular Demonic’, in J. Goodare, R. Voltmer and L. Helene Willumsen (eds.), Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe (London, 2020), pp. 127 – 47.

Sharpe, J., ‘The Devil in East Anglia: the Matthew Hopkins Trials Reconsidered’, in J. Barry, M. Hester, and G. Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 237 – 54.

Sharpe, J., ‘Witch Hunts in Britain’, in J. Dillinger (ed.), The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London, 2020), pp. 145 – 59.

Sipek, H., ‘Newe Zeitung. Marginalen zur Flugblatt – und Flugschriftenpublizistik sowie zur Druckgraphik im Kontext der Hexenverfolgung’, in S. Lorenz (ed.), Hexen und Hexenverfolgung im Deutschen Südwesten. Aufsatzband (Ostfildern, 1994), pp. 85 – 92.

Slotkin, J. E., Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern English Literature (Cham, 2017).

Stokes, L., Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (Basingstoke, 2011).Suhr, C., ‘Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets’, Studia Neophilogica, 84/1 (2012), pp. 130 – 42.

 

[1] R. Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, From the Ancient Times to the Present (London, 2017), pp. 41 – 3.

[2] B. P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (4th edn., London, 2016), p. 23.

[3] L. Kounine, Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2018), p. 7.

[4] M. Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London, 1999), pp. 14 and 36 – 7.

[5] G. Warburton, ‘Gender, Supernatural Power, Agency and the Metamorphoses of the Familiar in Early Modern Pamphlet Accounts of English Witchcraft’, Parergon, 20/2 (2003), p. 118.; Kounine, Imagining the Witch, p. 14.

[6] H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Heartland of the Witchcraze: Central and Northern Europe’, History Today, 31/2 (1981), p. 27.;  J. Dillinger, ‘Germany – “The Mother of the Witches”, in J. Dillinger (ed.), The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London, 2020), p. 94.

[7] J. Sharpe, ‘Witch Hunts in Britain’, in J. Dillinger (ed.), The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London, 2020), p. 145.

[8] B. Rosen, Witchcraft (London, 1969), p. 19.; Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, pp. 8 and 243.

[9] A. A. O Lynn, ‘Ghosts of War and Spirits of Place: Spectral Belief in Early Modern England and Protestant Germany’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 2018), p. 5.

[10] A. Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (London, 2014), p. 2.; H. Droste, ‘How Public Was the News in Early Modern Times?’, in H. Droste & K. Salmi-Niklander (eds.), Handwritten Newspapers: An Alternative Medium during the Early Modern and Modern Periods (Helsinki, 2019), p. 29.

[11] See, for example: W. W., A True and Just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at S. Ofes in the countie of Essex (London, 1582).; A Most Certain, Strange, and True Discovery of a Witch (London, 1643).; Warhafftige vnnd Erschreckliche Thatten vnd Handlungen der Lxiij. Hexen vnnd Unholden, so zu Wisenstaig, mit dem Brandt gericht worden seindt (Launigen, 1563).; Warhaffte und Glaubwirdige Zeytung. Wie man in diesem 1582. Jahr wol in die 200. und fuenff und zweyntzig Weiber verbrant hat (Strasbourg, 1582).

[12] S. Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (London, 2003), p. 35.

[13] W. Behringer, ‘Witchcraft and the Media’, in M. E. Plummer & R. B. Barnes (eds.), Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H. C. Erik Midelfort (Farnham, 2009), pp. 217 –36.; H. Sipek, ‘Newe Zeitung. Marginalen zur Flugblatt – und Flugschriftenpublizistik sowie zur Druckgraphik im Kontext der Hexenverfolgung’, in S. Lorenz (ed.), Hexen und Hexenverfolgung im Deutschen Südwesten. Aufsatzband (Ostfildern, 1994), pp. 85 – 92.; U. Krah, ‘Fiktionalität und Faktizität in frühneuzeitlichen Kleinschriften (Einblattdrucke und Flugschriften)’, in K. Moeller & B. Schmidt (eds.), Realität und Mythos: Hexenverfolgung und Rezeptionsgeschichte (Hamburg, 2003), pp. 77 – 87.; R. Walinksi-Kiehl, ‘Pamphlets, Propaganda and Witch-Hunting in Germany, 1560 – 1630’, Reformation, 6/1 (2002), pp. 49 – 74.; A. Warfield, ‘The Media Representation of the Crime of Witchcraft in Early Modern Germany: An Investigation of Non-Periodical Newsheets and Pamphlets, 1533-1669’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2013).

[14] Rosen, Witchcraft.; Gibson, Reading Witchcraft.; C. Suhr, ‘Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets’, Studia Neophilogica, 84/1 (2012), pp. 130 – 42.; J. Sharpe, ‘English Witchcraft Pamphlets and the Popular Demonic’, in J. Goodare, R. Voltmer and L. Helene Willumsen (eds.), Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe (London, 2020), pp. 127 – 47.; C. Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (London, 2017).

[15] C. Millar, ‘Diabolic Men: Reintegrating Male Witches into English Witchcraft’, The Seventeenth Century (2020), pp. 1 – 21.

[16] J. Dillinger, ‘Evil People’: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, trans. L. Stokes (Charlottesville, VA, 2009).; L. Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (Basingstoke, 2011).; L. N. Kallestrup, Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark (Basingstoke, 2015).

[17] M. Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft Trials in England’, in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), p. 289.; T. Robisheaux, ‘The German Witch Trials’ in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), p. 196.

[18] J. Kamp, Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main (Leiden 2019), p. 6.

[19] G. Walker & J. Kermode, ‘Introduction’ in J. Kermode & G. Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, 1994), p. 4.

[20] Clark, Women and Crime, p. 34.

[21] Sharpe, ‘Witch Hunts in Britain’, p. 151.

[22] Dillinger, ‘Germany – “The Mother of the Witches”’, p. 97.

[23] A. Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York, NY, 1974), pp. 125 – 50. M. Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, with a New Introduction by the author (London, 1991), pp. 179 – 85.

[24] A. Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’, in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), pp. 451 -3. L. Apps and A. C. Gow, Gender at the Stake: Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2003), p. 26.

[25] For a historiographical overview, see: Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’.

[26] See, for example: Apps and Gow, Gender at the Stake. and R. Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, trans. L. Froome-Döring (Basingstoke, 2009).

[27] Kounine, Imagining the Witch, p. 90.

[28] J. Goodare, The European Witch-Hunt (London, 2016), p. 310.

[29] The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex (London, 1566), sigs. Aiiiv, [Avir] and Biiir.

[30] A Rehearsall Both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches apprehended at Winsore in the Countie of Berks. (London, 1579), sigs. Ar and Avr.

[31] Warhafftige Newe Zeittung auß dem Land Westvahlen von der Stat Ossenbruck wie man da hat auff einen Tag 133. Unholden verbrendt (s.l., 1588), (unpaginated – p. 1.).

[32] U. Molitor, Von den Uholden oder Hexen (Augsburg, 1508), sig. [Bvv].

[33] R. Lutz, Warhafftige Zeittung Von Gottlosen Hexen Auch Ketzerischen und Teuffels Weibern die zu Schettstadt deß H. Römischen Reichstadt in Elsaß auf den XXII. Herbstmonat deß 1570 Jahrs von wegen ihrer schändtlichen Teuffelsverpflichtung sind verbrennt (s.l, 1571), sig. Ar.

[34] C. Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 2007), pp. 12 – 26.

[35] ‘nach dem alten Sprichwort/ Was der Teuffel nicht kan zu wege bringen/ das bringt er durch ein alt Weib zu wege’: H. Kuntz, Newe Zeitung von einer Erschrecklicher That, welche zu Dillingen, von einem Jhesuwider, vnd einer Hexen geschehen ist (Basel, 1579), sig. Aiiir.  H. Kuntz, Newe Zeitung von einer Erschrecklicher That, welche zu Dillingen, von einem Jhesuwider, vnd einer Hexen geschehen ist (Urssel, 1580), sig. Aiiir. Newe Zeitung aus Berneburgk Schrecklich und abschewlich zu hoeren und zu lesen von dreyen alten Teuffels Bulerin Hexin oder Zauberinnen (s.l., 1580), sig. Br.

[36] A Rehearsall Both Straung and True, sig. Ar.

[37] A Rehearsall Both Straung and True, sig. Avv.

[38] A Rehearsall Both Straung and True, sig. [Aviv].

[39] R. Galis, A Brief Treatise Containing the Most Strange and Horrible Cruelty of Elizabeth Stile alias Rockingham and her Confederates (London, 1579), sig. [Ciiiv].

[40] Galis, A Brief Treatise, sig. Dv.

[41] Galis, A Brief Treatise, sigs. Ciiv and [Diiiir].

[42] Warhaffte und Glaubwirdige Zeytung. Wie man in diesem 1582. Jahr wol in die 200. und fuenff und zweyntzig Weiber verbrant hat (Strasbourg, 1582).

[43] See, for example: Ein New kläglich Lied von dem grossen Schaden der Unholden So sie in Westphalen zu Aschenbruegk und andern Orten begangen haben in dem jetztwerenden 1583. Jar (Wesel, 1583) and Ein Warhafftige Zeitung Von etlichen Hexen oder Unholden welche man kürtzlich im Stifft Mäntz zu Ascheburg, Dipperck,Ostum, Rönßhoffen auch andern Orten verbrendt was Ubels sie gestifft und bekandt haben (Frankfurt am Main, 1603).

[44] ‘man hat auch vier und viertzig Weiber und drey Man gefangen/ und den 24. Oct: zu Mimpelgart verbant’: Warhaffte und Glaubwirdige Zeytung, sig. [Aiiir].

[45] Warhaffte und Glaubwirdige Zeytung, sig. [Aiiiir].

[46] ‘dem leydigen Sathan solche gewalt/uber den schwachen Werckzeug weibliches Geschlecht’: Warhaffte und Glaubwirdige Zeytung, sig. [Aiiiir].

[47] See, for example: T. Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster With the arraignement and triall of nineteene notorious witches (London, 1613).;   Witchcrafts, Strange and Wonderfull: Discovering the Damnable Practices of Seven Witches, against the lives of certaine noble personages, and others of this kingdome, as shall appeare in this lamentable history (London, 1635).; Zwo erschreckliche und unerhörte Geschicht, welches in diesem XCCI Jar geschehen ist auff dem Brockersberg, dar sich ahn die hundert tausend Unholden oder Hexen versamlet (Cologne, 1596).

[48] Warfield, ‘The Media Representation of the Crime of Witchcraft’, p. 265.

[49] A. Pettegree, The Invention of News, p. 92.

[50] T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550 – 1640 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 3.; J. Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (London, 1992), p. 38.

[51] Pettegree, The Invention of News, p. 93. J. Wiltenburg, ‘True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism’, American Historical Review, 109/5 (2004), p. 1382.

[52] Pettegree, The Invention of News, p. 94.

[53] The Life and Death of Lewis Gaufredy (London, 1612), sigs. A2r – A4v.

[54] Zwo Warhafftige newe Zeitungen […] Die andere Zeitung: Eine abschewliche vnd zuuor nie erhoerte erschreckliche Zaubereyen Moerdt vnnd Diebereyen von Vater Mutter zweyen Soehnen vnd zweyen Toechtermaennern geschehen Welche in … Muenchen im Beyerland sind gefaenglich eingezogen worden. (Basel, 1600), sigs. Aiiv – Aiiiiv.

[55] ANNO MDLXXXVI. Ist bey Bedbur ein Zauberer geweßen STVMP PETER genant, welcher sich in einen WOLF verwandelt (s.l., 1589).; Warhafftige und wunderbarliche Newe Zeitung von einem Bawren der sich durch Zauberey deß Tags siben stunnd zu einem Wolff verwandelt hat (Augsburg, 1589).; Warhafftige und Wunderbarlich Newe Zeitung von einem Pauren der sich durch Zauberey des tags siben stund zu ainen Wolff verwandelt hat (Nuremberg, 1589).; Warhafftige und erschreckliche Beschreibung, von einem Zauberer (Stupe Peter genandt) der sich zu einem Wehrwolff hat können machen (Cologne, 1589).; J. van Gehlen, Warachtighe ende verschrickelijcke beschryvinge van vele toovenaers, hoe ende waerom men die verbrandt heeft in 1589 (Antwerp, 1589); En forskreckelig oc sand bescriffuelse om mange troldfolck som ere forbrends for deris misgierninger skyld fra det aar 1589 (Copenhagen, 1591).; A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter, a Most Wicked Sorcerer (London, 1590).

[56] A. Warfield, ‘Witchcraft and the Early Modern Media’, in J. Dillinger (ed.), The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London, 2020), p. 215.

[57] S. K. Barker, ‘International News Pamphlets’, in A Kesson and E. Smith (eds.), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2016), pp. 152 – 4.

[58] ANNO MDLXXXVI. Ist bey Bedbur ein Zauberer geweßen STVMP PETER genant.; Warhafftige und wunderbarliche Newe Zeitung von einem Bawren.; Warhafftige und Wunderbarlich Newe Zeitung von einem Pauren .; Warhafftige und erschreckliche Beschreibung, von einem Zauberer .; A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter.

[59] ‘unsäglich schandt unndt Laster’: ANNO MDLXXXVI. Ist bey Bedbur ein Zauberer geweßen STVMP PETER genant.; ‘schröcklich ist es zu hören an’: Warhafftige vnd wunderbarliche Newe Zeitung von einem Bawren.; A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter, p. 12.

[60] ANNO MDLXXXVI. Ist bey Bedbur ein Zauberer geweßen STVMP PETER genant.

[61] A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter, p. 1.

[62] Barker, ‘International News Pamphlets’, p. 150.

[63] Warfield, ‘Witchcraft and the Early Modern Media’, p. 215.

[64] Warhafftige und erschreckliche Beschreibung, von einem Zauberer, sigs. Aiv – Aiir.

[65] A True Discourse. Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter, pp. 1, 7, and 10.

[66] M. Parker, The Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, / The great suposed Coniurer, who was wounded to death by Saylers / and other Lads, on Fryday the 14. of Iune, 1628. And dyed in the / Poultry Counter, neere Cheapside, on the Saturday morning following (London, 1628).

[67] Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, sig. Br.

[68] G. B, A most wicked worke of a wretched witch (the like whereof none can record these manie yeeres in England.) (London, 1592).

[69] See, for example: W. W., A True and Just Recorde. and The Examination, Confession, Triall, and Execution, of Joane Williford, Joan Cariden, and Jane Hott: who were executed at Feversham in Kent, for being witches, on Munday the 29 of September, 1645 (London, 1645).

[70] Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’, p. 466. J. Dillinger, Hexen und Magie (2nd edn., Frankfurt am Main, 2018), p. 126.

[71] K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), p. 671.; L. Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (London, 2004), p. 161.

[72] Newe Zeitung aus Berneburgk, sig. Aiir.

[73] Kuntz, Newe Zeitung von einer Erschrecklicher That, sig. Av.

[74] A Rehearsall Both Straung and True, sig. Aiiiir.

[75] The Apprehension and Confession of Three Notorious Witches. Arreigned and by Justice condemned and executed at Chelmes-forde, in the Countye of Essex, the 5. day of Iulye, last past. 1589 (London, 1589), sig. Aiiir.

[76] R. M. Toivo, ‘Witchcraft and Gender’, in J. Dillinger (ed.), The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London, 2020), p. 225.

[77] The Witches of Northamptonshire Agnes Browne. Ioane Vaughan. Arthur Bill. Hellen Ienkenson. Mary Barber. (London, 1612), sig. A3r.

[78] The Witches of Northamptonshire, sig. B2r and Cv.

[79] See, for example: Warhafftige Newe Zeittung auß dem Land Westvahlen von der Stat Ossenbruck.

[80] See, for example: Warhafftige und erschreckliche Beschreibung, von einem Zauberer (Stupe Peter genandt), sig. Aiiir.; Erweyterte Unholden-Zeitung: Kurze Erzelung wie viel der Unholden hin vnd wider/ sonderlich inn dem Obern Teutschland/ gefängklich eingezogen (Ulm, 1590), sig. [Aiiiir].; Zwo schröckliche Newe Zeitung, die erste ist von dem grewlichen Elendt, so sich in Aschenburck am Maynstrom von Hexen unnd Unholten geschehen (Giessen, 1612).  Sig. Aiir.

[81]  Robisheaux, ‘The German Witch Trials’, p. 187.

[82] H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562 – 1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, CA, 1972), pp. 178 – 85.  

[83] ‘Manns und Weibspersonen/ jung und alt/ arm und reich/ so der Hexenkunst und Zauberey erfahren/ hinrichten und verbrennen’: Zwo Hexenzeitung: Die Erste Auß dem Bisthumb Würtzburg, das ist Gründliche Erzehlung wie der Bishoff zu Würtzburg das Hexenbrennen im Franckenlande angefangen […] die Ander Auß dem Hertzogthumb Würtenburg wie der Hertzog zu Würtenberg in unterschiedlichen Stätten das Hexenbrennen auch angefangen (Tübingen, 1616), (unpaginated – p.1).

[84] ‘Teglich mehr eingefangen viel/ kein ansehen der Person gilt/ Reich/ Arm/ Schön/ Herr und Frawen’: Gewisser Bericht des Truten und Hexenbrennens Bambergischen Gebiets wie lang es gewehrt: Was für ubels ihrer Außsag nach sie viel Jahr hero an Menschen, Vihe, Früchten und andern verübet was allbereit verbrennet (Schmalkalden, 1628), sigs. Aiiiv and [Aiiiir].

[85] Ein Warhafftige und gründliche Beschreibung Auß dem Bistumb Würtz und Bamberg Deßgleichen von dem ganzen Fränkischen Kraiß wie man alda so vil hexen Mann vnd Weibspersohnen verbrennen laßt (S.l., 1627), sig. Av.

[86] Ein Warhafftige und gründliche Beschreibung Auß dem Bistumb Würtz und Bamberg, sig. Av.

[87] M. Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and Evidence in early modern England’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), pp. 46 – 54.

[88] J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550 – 1750 (London, 1996), pp. 128 – 9.

[89] Millar, ‘Diabolic Men’, p. 8.

[90] A Most Certain, Strange, and true Discovery of a Witch, sig. A2r.

[91] Signes and Wonders from Heaven (London, 1645), pp. 2 – 5.

[92] Signes and Wonders from Heaven, p. 3.

[93] A. Rowlands, ‘Not the Usual Suspects? Male, Witchcraft, and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe’, in A. Rowlands (ed.), Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 6.

[94] J. Sharpe, ‘The Devil in East Anglia: the Matthew Hopkins Trials Reconsidered’, in J. Barry, M. Hester, and G. Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), p. 249. Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions, p. 8.

[95] The Examination of John Walsh  […] upon certayn interrogatories touchyng wytchcrafte and sorcerye (London, 1566), sig. Aiir.

[96] Des allerdurchleuchtigsten, groszmechtigsten vnüberwindlichsten Keyser Karls des Fünfften, vnd des Heyligen Römischen Reichs peinlich Gerichts ordnung:auff den Reichßtägen zu Augspurg vnd Regenspurg, in jaren dreissig vnd zwey vnd dreissig gehalten, auffgericht vnd beschlossen (Frankfurt am Main, 1562), sig. Dr.

[97] Augusten Hertzogen zu Sachsen … Verordnungen und Constitutionen des rechtlichen Process (Dresden, 1572), sig. ff. 71v – 72r.

[98] ‘An Act agaynst conjuracons inchantmentes and Witchecraftes (5 Eliz I, c. 16)’, in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4 part I (London, 1819), p. 446.

[99] ‘An Act agaynst conjuracons inchantmentes and Witchecraftes (5 Eliz I, c. 16)’, in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4 part I (London, 1819), p. 446.

[100] ‘An Act against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealing with evill and wicked Spirits (1 Jac. I, c. 12)’, in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4 part II (London, 1819), p. 1028.

[101] ‘An Act against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealing with evill and wicked Spirits (1 Jac. I, c. 12)’, in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4 part II (London, 1819), p. 1028.

[102] C. Holmes, ‘Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England’, in S. L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (New York, NY, 1984), p. 87.

[103] Sharpe, ‘English witchcraft pamphlets and the popular demonic’, pp. 127 – 8.

[104] Millar, ‘Diabolic Men’, p. 14. Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England, p. 48.

[105] W. W., A True and Just Recorde, sigs. A3r – v.

[106] W. W., A True and Just Recorde, sig. A3v.

[107] M. Gibson, ‘French demonology in an English village: the St Osyth experiment of 1582’, in J. Goodare, R. Voltmer & L. Helene Willumsen (eds.), Demonology and witch-hunting in early modern Europe (London, 2020), p. 108.

[108] The Witches of Northamptonshire, sig. A4v.

[109] Lutz, Von Gottlosen Hexen, sig. Av.

[110] The Wonderful Discouerie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, daughters of Ioan Flower neere Bever Castle (London, 1619), sig. Bv.

[111] The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde.

[112] The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde, sigs. [Aviiv] – [Biiiir].

[113] Erweyterte Unholden-Zeitung, sig. A2r – v.

[114] Dillinger, ‘Germany – “the Mother of the Witches”’, p. 98.

[115] Rowlands, ‘Not the Usual Suspects’, p. 19.

[116] Wiltenburg, ‘True Crime: the Origins of Modern Sensationalism’, p. 1383.

[117] Wiltenburg, ‘True Crime’, p. 1385.; J. E., Slotkin, Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern English Literature (Cham, 2017), p. 132.; Krah, ‘Fiktionalität und Faktizität’, p. 77.

[118] Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, p. 69.; Wiltenburg, ‘True Crime’, pp. 1384 -5 .

[119] Ein Warhafftige vnd gründtliche BeschreibungAuß dem Bistum Würtz und Bamberg, sig. Aiiv.

[120] ‘das schier alle Stödt/ Märckt/ und Dörffer/im gantzen Teutschland […] desselbigen unzifers und Teuffelsdienern voll seindt’: Erweyterte Unholden-Zeitung, sig. A2r.

[121] G. B, A most wicked worke of a wretched witch, sig. Av.

Why Were Colonial Powers Interested in Sexuality?

Why were colonial powers interested in sexuality? In his 1847 account of the Aboriginal Australians, designed to familiarise new white settlers with the indigenous population, George Angus made sure to note why the settlement of aboriginal lands was entirely justified. ‘The population of the native tribes inhabiting South Australia is not considerable’ remarked Angus, because […]

Pierre Nora, Memory, and the Myth of Elizabeth I

In this article Tom Rose explores the dominant theme in cultural history: the concept of memory. Tom argues  that the concept of memory should be a vital component of early-modern studies and evaluates the applicability of the theorist Pierre Nora to the mythology of Elizabeth I.

Download a PDF Version of this Article Here

Tom Rose

Author Biography

Tom Rose is a Midlands3Cities AHRC-funded PhD student based at the University of Nottingham. Tom’s current research explores the relationship between hunting, politics and culture in early Stuart England. This essay explores the role of memory in the production of history and was written for the University of Nottingham History Masters module ‘Research Methods in History’.

Read more