Gendered Magic and the Folk Witches

The gender stereotyping on the 1200s was different than the later periods, but far from non-existent, and would also vary significantly by region. Many a female academic, for example, were forced into prostitution after being raped since they were no longer a virgin. That hardly applied equally to men. On the other hand while the oppression of women was greater than that of men, the general existence of oppression as pretty widespread, and magical traditions which offered a escape from that oppression were likewise likely to be common. That there existed women's mysteries and mens mysteries however is hardly controversial- such can be seen throughout the world- I recall on a tour of Australia being told that certain markings at Ayer's rock only held meaning for the men of the local tribe while other markings held meaning for the women since they were part of their instruction in their related mysteries, and that is hardly an issue of modern eurocentric perspective. Now how much these mysteries connect to any particular type of magic, or whether they are simply sex education of aboriginal health classes I cannot say, but they certainly do exist.

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I don't think anyone disagrees or is trying to say the 1200s were some beacon of gender equality except perhaps in comparison to some following periods, remember the discussion was centered on whether the magical practices that are used to make up the core of the Folk Witch tradition were actually as gender-associated in 1200s W. Europe as pop history (and the text of Hedge Magic) implies - the answer of specialists in the question appears to be "No."

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The growth of enclosure and the death of common land always depresses me.

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History is a place of consistent disagreement, debate and argument.

A good example was a well received book called Dark Emu which suggested a more technological indigenous culture in Australia than was previous thought. Some respected academics had serious reservations about this narrative.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/author-bruce-pascoes-bestselling-aboriginal-history-book-dark-emu-debunked/news-story/2f0e0da56ce70a008a6cbe3aa836a9af

I could also link to numerous articles from historians stating Joan of Arc was trans, and counter articles from historians stating she was not.

History has the inherent biases of the culture and time in place it was written, and thus we need to have a degree of cynicism towards history. It is an accurate record of what the author wants remembered. We have to remember anyone reviewing history also has their own cultural biases and are creating an accurate record of what they want remembered.

Anne Llewellyn Barstowe is a historian and specialist who would say the answer is yes.

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Sure, and there's certainly various layers of disagreement presented in Rider's survey of current literature on the question, which is necessarily true when collecting most of the various advances made in the last decade or so of study on medieval magic (the Routledge text was published in 2019) - but that itself helps buttress the claim. If the array of experts whose work is brought up in the passages from the Routledge text that I have cited all provide a certain level of agreement on this question, each from various angles and through their own methodologies and investigations in their own books, it does indicate the general strength of the argument. The bibliography collected to look at the question of gender and magic in the medieval period within the survey text is quite extensive - even a small subsection would include the recent work of Michael D. Bailey (From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages and The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages), Jean-Patrice Boudet (Entre Science et Nigromance: Astrologie, Divination et Magic dans l’Occident Médiéval), Heidi Breuer (Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England), Laine E. Doggett (Love Cures: Healing and Magic in Old French Romance), Frank Klaassen (Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic of the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance and The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance), Peter Murray Jones (Performative Rituals for Conception and Childbirth in England, 900–1500), Richard Kieckhefer (Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe and Magic in the Middle Ages) among many others besides her own work on the question (Magic and Religion in Medieval England, Magic and Gender, Women, Men and Love Magic in Late Medieval English Pastoral Manuals, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages.)

I think it's pretty obvious that the argument synthesized out of the work of these scholars isn't just some pop history bestseller or lone radical voice in the field (and I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little offended that folks think I could be so easily suckered into presenting such content as authoritative, considering that I do this for a living) but clearly something that should be engaged with as an emerging consensus based on the best work we have available at the moment - not to say that couldn't change, my field of Ottoman studies is famous (or maybe infamous) for shifting rapidly on many questions every few years thanks to the sheer pace of new research so I know just how quickly the cutting edge can become outdated, but we have to work with the best efforts that are present in the now.

Interesting. Looking into her very briefly, of the stuff generally relevant to this discussion, I'm seeing one (relatively older compared to the bulk of the research above, which can be a problem in fast changing fields) book that appears to focus on the witch trials after the period under discussion. Does it maybe talk about earlier periods in a specific section that you could post here?

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I quoted the key part I was responding to in my earlier response. Anyone claiming the answers of the specialists is clear, well, it's unlikely to have a consensus in a humanities field. I am relatively confident, you, who are much more researched in this field, could list a bunch of historians who suggest the link to gender and folk magic traditions was quite strong.

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I meant more the specific passage from Dr. Barstowe you were using as a reference, since I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the book.

I don't really agree on this part - consensuses on new interpretations of resources aren't that weird at all. Sometimes they take a while to form, the Ottoman Decline Thesis started being dismantled in the 70s and it took decades for the newer research of historians to accumulate until it became clear that declensionist thesis was unsupportable, but since the 2000s after long work it's dead as dead can be in academia. Consensus, if I've ever seen it. People can have debates over the extent and nature of a reinterpretation while agreeing in the general contours of that reinterpretation. Now, medieval W. Euro magic certainly isn't my field, but Dr. Rider and her colleagues have presented a strong argument drawing on the most current work produced by many of the leading experts in the field in the Routledge text - I don't at all believe they are in lockstep or anything, the book itself goes into some of the debates when discussing the nature of love magic (the one "low" practice, as I mentioned above, where current scholarship seems to generally agree with older ideas about the femininity of folk magics):

Magic relating to love, sex and fertility is probably the form of magic most often cited by modern scholars as a female activity. Scholars have varied in how they interpret this information. On the one hand, Kieckhefer emphasizes that although women were more likely than men to be accused, this does not mean they were necessarily more likely to do love magic in practice: rather, men may have found it more convenient than women to blame their sexual transgressions on magic, and they may also have been more able to make the authorities take their allegations seriously. On the other hand, some scholars have suggested that women may really have been more likely than men to use forms of  magic relating to sex and reproduction. Textual amulets to help women in childbirth were, unsurprisingly, intended to be used to benefit women, but since they were written documents, they were probably produced by men and men are often expected to play leading roles in performing the rituals involved. To take another example, the association  between women and magic to cause impotence is so persistent in case records and in ec- clesiastical condemnations that it may reflect a real tendency for women to use this form  of magic on men in particular situations, although even here accusations may reflect male insecurities and fears of what an angry former girlfriend might do to them rather than the  realities of practice. However, as these examples show, it is extremely difficult to write  about certain forms of magic as women’s magic because most of the surviving sources were written by men rather than by the women themselves. It is therefore almost impossible to know how far they reflect a genuine difference in practice and how far they draw on the kinds of stereotypes about women, sex and magic discussed in the previous section.

...which I believe lends the argument more credence when it notes that despite these differences, all the scholars cited say that there was a general W. European late medieval trend of feminizing folk practices (as part of larger delegitimization processes) that were previously devoid of gendered connotations - flight, cursing, dowsing, healing, animal command and the others discussed in the posts above.

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I wanted to thank you for bringing the Routledge Guide to Medieval Magic to my attention. I ordered a copy and look forward to getting to review it.

I think your conclusions on Folk Witches are valid. I can't offer a lot more historical analysis of this, as I don't have as many sources to discuss- but it does seem like the idea that Folk Witches are necessarily more predominantly women than men doesn't hold up.

Some people have mentioned the demographics of areas with more predominantly male traditions leading to more predominantly female Folk Witch traditions, but that shifts from an analysis of historical magical practice and into textual analysis of the Ars Magica game and how Mythic Europe departs from historical Europe.

In that context, it makes sense that if you view Folk Witches as an example of an endemic tradition of peasant magic (as @InfinityzeN mentions up thread), then it would follow that the local Folk Witch demographics will reflect the gender preferences of other local magical traditions. This assumes that the Folk Witch tradition is, however, less able to assert its own preferences with regards to new gifted student's gender, class or other trait's than the other traditions.

If, for example, the Vitki, Elementalists or Learned Magicians represent one of the more dominant magical traditions due to magical or social power, then they are more likely to get the kinds of apprentices they want. Folk Witches are more likely to be drawn from groups of people with less political or social power than, say, a Learned Magician (who will be a scholar of some kind and possibly relatively wealthy) or an Elementalist who is capable of terrifying acts of theurgic power.

That, however, will not reflect historical trends- just the demographics created by the setting.

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Young_Ottoman, I think you are misrepresenting Rider's point, and distorting it to support an ideological thesis. Let us focus, for simplicity, on healing magic. Rider's point is, very succintly and with inevitable simplification, as follows.

Up to approximately the 13th century, healing is women's business; this includes healing "magic". The 13th century sees a progressive guildification of many service industries, which become restricted to authorized professionals. In the healthcare industry, this guildification is mediated by university training (and other gateways) almost completely restricted to men. Soon, this new elite wages a war for monopoly against "old school" practitioners, calling their practice fraud and superstition. This progressively melds with the emergent war that the (male dominated) Church is waging against pre-christian superstitions, and female practitioners of healing become "witchified".

I agree with this position. Your passage above does not contradict it, but subtly reframes it so that it appears to support your initial thesis: "folk witch magical practices in the early 13th century are still not gender-associated". But Rider's text and sources do not support it at all. The dychotomy reputable scientific healing = male, superstitious witch healing = female was indeed brought into existence, or at least significantly strengthened at that point in time, by the "guildification" process above. But it is incorrect (and I am tempted to say dishonest) to say that (Rider says) healing magical practices had no gender association before it. Healing magical practices, as most healing, were strongly feminine. It's just that through that process men appropriated the "reputable, scientific" part of it, leaving (only) the magic to women -- a magic that had, however, always belonged to women.

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Given the above, region will also matter greatly, since the guildification of the healing arts did not happen i all places at the same time, meaning the status of magical women healers vs. a male educational system may well vary significantly between Provence and Normandy, never mind the impact in more distant reas like Iberia and Hibernia.

Her position on healing magic actually has very little to do with the position on love and sex magic above - here are the operative sections from the only passages on healing in the paper. You'll notice that both distinctly approach it as ungendered in the sources we do have.

In part, this is due to the difficulties posed by the sources that often do not present healing or divination as particularly male or female activities (in contrast to their depictions of women doing love magic or men calling up demons) but more could be done to unpick the stereotypes and accusations that we do see in, for example, exempla featuring healers and diviners. Another potential line of enquiry is to investigate whether the same kinds of healing, divination or other forms of magic were viewed differently when done by men and when done by women.

and

Women were more likely than men to be accused of harmful magic while men were more likely to be accused of magical treasure hunting. Conversely, other forms of magic, such as healing or finding stolen goods, were linked to men and women in roughly equal numbers. More can be done in local
archives across Europe to explore whether these or other patterns are found more generally.

I specifically picked an example where her and her colleagues' analysis actually agrees with most existing ideas for Lee's sake, to illustrate the point of contention vs consensus. I already mentioned up-thread that love magic appears as something of an outlier.

She outright says above that there's not any conclusive evidence yet collected on the differences that may exist between male and female healing exactly because our sources don't tend to make this distinction, so I'm not sure where this conjecture is coming from. The process of feminization here also appears to be misunderstood, I'll turn to Dr. Bailey's paper on the feminization of magic (which Dr. Rider cites often) to explain what she actually meant:

The witch here, who happens to be female although by no means all the witches Nider described were, seems to enjoy a tremendous amount of power over the demon, and an incredibly easy sort of power. A necromancer might have to labor for hours or even days with a complex ritual to summon a demon, but a witch just needed to stir up some water with the end of a broom. Yet in the minds of clerical authorities the witch controlled and directed exactly the same sort of real and effective demonic power that the necromancer might command— indeed at one point in the Formicarius, Nider explicitly equated maleficium with necromantia. The solution to this apparent discrepancy in power and preparation lay in the very nature and essence of witchcraft as a system of magic, as compared to necromancy. Theologians typically conceived of necromancy as necessarily involving pacts with demons and worship exchanged for supernatural services. Although necromancers often presented themselves as the masters of demons, controlling these evil spirits through the power of their complex and often quasi-religious formulations and ceremonies, theologians and inquisitors understood necromancers as subjecting themselves to demons. Yet all the complex paraphernalia of necromancy remained, all the long ceremonies and intricate invocations, that could (potentially at least) obscure the issue. Witchcraft entailed a much more unambiguous and in many ways a much simpler concept of magical operation. The central aspect of witchcraft, from a theological point of view, was the complete and absolutely explicit submission of the witch to demons and ultimately to the devil. This was typically acted out in the supposed ceremonies of the witches’ sabbath. At these assemblies, filled with all the lurid horrors that centuries of accumulated clerical polemic against heretics and heretical cults could provide, witches came before the devil, surrendered themselves entirely to his service, and in exchange were given magical potions, powders, and the ability to command demons with only simple gestures or spells. This was a sort of magical operation more suited to the masses of Europe, enabling educated authorities to see demonic forces at work among large segments of the population, and providing a necessary basis for the widespread witch hunts to come. It was also a sort of magical operation that was now once again apt for both women and men....Thus in the movement of theological concern from necromancy to witchcraft in the early 1400s, certain underlying conceptions of magic became, in a way, feminized.

The feminization process as understood by Rider and co. is one that has much more to do with the clerisy's shift in focus as new ways of engaging with the question of how deviltry can be conducted come into currency in church literature that encompass folk practice as well as the "learned magic" that clerical texts typically tended to center on before than a guildification. You'll again note (in bold) that Bailey explicitly mentions that this folk practice was the province of both men and women (the very earliest example of this new style, Nider, who the author explains as "the first clerical authority to discuss female witches specifically in terms of their gender" still considers these common deviltries a mixed practice well after the process has begun) but misogyny being what it was, once women had become a valid target of anti-magic writings now that their heterogeneously gendered practices had been opened to inclusion in polemics by newer intellectual understandings of how invoking supernatural power operated, they almost immediately took the brunt of the new onslaught that would culminate in the near total religo-legal feminization of these practices and ultimately the witch hunts.

Where exactly does she say this? I certainly can't seem to find anything of the sort in either her paper or the companion piece Medicine and Magic by Peter Murray Jones and Lea T. Olsan in the same Routledge text - the few gendered examples given there are practiced by men.

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Ey, very cool! It's a solid book, I hope you enjoy it. Besides Rider's paper, I also found Burnett's Arabic magic: The impetus for translating texts and their reception, Kieckhefer's Rethinking how to define magic, and Draelants' The notion of properties: Tensions between Scientia and Ars in medieval natural philosophy and magic to be pretty illuminating.

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Thanks, I'll add those to my reading list! I really appreciate all these fascinating sources!

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