Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

The tension in such a scene is palpable: Roper carefully reconstructs a number of witchcraft accusations that were connected to the lying-in chamber.

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Perhaps most noteworthy of all, the lying-in chamber was also a distinctly women-only space. Roper thus shows that witchcraft was a clearly gendered experience, but not simply in 'male vs.

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Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany: Lyndal Roper: www.newyorkethnicfood.com: Books

Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Volume 24, Number 2, pp. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Many of the witches held out a remarkably long time under torture: In part this was probably because she wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to be confessing to. With a skilled inquisitor, however, a witch could be guided towards an account of her oddness, her not fitting in, that made sense to both parties.

Roper sees these intense sessions, which could stretch over several months, as anticipating Freud's psycho-analytic "talking cure" of years later although Freud, mercifully, did not rely on thumb screws. The centrepiece of the narrative, the scene on which everything turned, was, of course, that initial "visitation" by the devil. It fitted the psychological and erotic economy of the time that the witch's induction into evil should be sexually transgressive otherwise, presumably, she could simply have asked the devil in for a cup of tea.

Something about her body - infertile yet still potentially sexual - tipped the community into a collective fantasy about what it might feel like to desire a woman whose stomach sagged and whose breasts were empty.

In league with the devil

In this hugely ambitious book Roper wants to do more than offer an account of the German witch crazes of the late 16th century. She also hopes to find out how these witches - individual, historical actors with names such as Barbara Stetcher, Maria Holl and Juditha Wagner - ended up as the generic bogey women of the 19th-century fairy tale. Catharina Schmid, the year-old accused of wiping out an entire family and a whole farmyard of animals, was forced to make her confession in the dawning age of Enlightenment, at a time when most sensible people were beginning to think that stories about dancing naked with the devil were frankly rather silly.

It is for this reason, says Roper, that neither Schmid nor her interrogators could really be bothered to go through the motions of constructing a convincing narrative, and the results are sketchy and dull. All the same, there was nothing half-hearted about the eight months of vicious torture that Schmid endured, nor the calculatedly humiliating sentence of death by strangulation. And yet, the curious fact remains that only 60 years after Schmid's death, the witch was making a comeback. This time, though, she was no longer out making mischief in the milking sheds or the store room but was confined to the pages of story books.

For when the Grimm brothers went collecting for their "Children's and Household Tales" they found plenty of witches ready to hand out poisoned apples and lock up children in gingerbread homes, prior to eating them. The difference was that this time around, all those food symbols spoke not of scarcity and starvation in small agrarian villages but of love and loathing in the bourgeois nursery.

It is vital and irresistible to try to make windows on the souls of our ancestors, and in this compelling, courageous and inspirational work Lyndal Roper leads the way. A major contribution to an already remarkable body of academic work. Lyndal Roper breaks new ground in her remarkable, subtle analysis of the interpersonal relations among those caught up in fantasies of witchcraft. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

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Witchcraft in Europe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: Here's how restrictions apply. Review "In this brilliant piece of investigative history [and]. Her style is fluent and accessible, but those who examine the 59 pages of closely printed notes will rapidly see the depth of scholarship that underpins her work. This is an interesting book and one in which the author has provided her readers with a good selection of primary materials.

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Davidson, Sixteenth Century Journal. It is also of great interest to all students of psychology, delusion and the madness of crowds, fear and fanaticism, life and law. It is a major work which must be read, not only by those interested in witch hunting in Germany, but by those in related fields.

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It has, indeed, much to tell us about the human condition as a whole. Should ensure Roper's position as the doyenne of witchcraft scholarship for many years to come.

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Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. I've read quite a few books on the history of witchcraft, but this one truly sets itself apart. A beautiful impassioned work that looks into the psychology of the concept of the witch. Namely, how is it that poor old women are seen by her contemporaries as death dealing harpies in league with the devil and out to destroy the foundations of Christiandom.

The author reveals how the aging female body was an obsession for those who propagated the witch myth; the idea that as women age and become infertile, they develop a repulsive sexual appetite due to jealousy. Sexual union with the devil is sought, and the woman becomes a malevolent witch.

Other factors contributing to this demonology are also looked at, including family conflicts and children who act out in extreme ways and are labeled as diabolical by their clueless parents.

Lyndal Roper's tome, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, attempts to investigate the "realms" of "fantasy, envy and terror" in the psychology of Germans during the early 's and into the 's xi. These psychological states are, in Roper's estimation, critical to an investigation of history, especially witchcraft, as these lines of consciousness drove perceptions and realities during the Baroque era. Societies developed semiotic categorizations as well as mental schemas, to delineate and identify witchery. These abstractions, or "unconscious fantasies," became the reality of the "witch craze" and the resulting witch hunt, trial and execution.

The symbols and fears of witchcraft itself revolved around notions of femininity and fertility. Utilizing these concepts, Roper employs a Freudian histoiographical approach. Prominently investigating Southern Germany, specifically Marchtal, Augsburg and Nordlingen in Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg, she explores "the fantasy of witchcraft, the reasons for its persuasiveness" in the Baroque Era, "and its gradual decline"