ACADEMIA
Letters
The Witch Mark: Hocus Pocus or Evidence for a 17thCentury Epidemic of Lyme Disease?
Mary Drymon [DeRose]
In his eloquently written book The Biography of a Germ, Arno Karlen mused about the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi that causes Lyme disease. He wrote “it is understandable that people failed for a while to identify Lyme disease in all its complexity, but…the bull’s-eye rash of itsrst phase is hard to miss. If Americans did not notice it before the 1970’s, perhaps it wasn't here.”[1] Recent genome studies of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria in America have found that indeed it was circulating in North America before colonial times, was nearly eradicated by the deforestation associated with the spread of agriculture, and then roared back during the twentieth century. Researchers analyzed mutations in the genome of the bacterium that allowed them to trace the evolutionary path that it took. They found ancestral variations ingenetic sequences that suggest it originated in the Northeast and then spread to the Midwest. The Ixodes tick that carries and spreads Lyme disease has been around for millennia. The oldest known case of Lyme disease was found by researchers in the DNA of the five thousand year old ice mummy known as Otzi.
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Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession
1996, American Historical Review, 101/2, pp. 307-330.
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This essay was provoked by my reading a excellent book on Salem by Bernard Rosenthal. The term "possession," as I had noticed in other works on Salem, was used as if there was no ontological or etiological difference from extreme forms of bewitchment. A quick search through the literature indicated that this was a general problem. Accordingly, I trawled through the primary material to find out just how often the distinction arose, and what influence such discussion might have had, First two paragraphs follow below In England, accusations of witchcraft involving extreme psychological symptoms were rare, by comparison with those concerning physical illness. They loom large in the historiography because some cases were publicized and disputed at the time. Such cases rarely extended beyond a single family and one or two accused. Therefore, the events that began at Salem Village, Massachusetts Colony, in the 1690s, leading to accusations in several towns and the series of trials at Salem, are unique in the annals of Anglo-American law. Failing to follow the patterns of interaction seen in ordinary witchcraft cases, they were difficult to explain at the time and have puzzled historians ever since. Historians of New England have fruitfully studied the local context of witchcraft accusations, but there has been less attention to the English religious background or the intellectual context, comparisons usually being drawn between the Salem events and European demonic outbreaks or African possession cults. The European term, "possession," has been applied by anthropologists to phenomena in diverse cultures. When their work is used by historians, the original meaning tends to be obscured. Before drawing cross-cultural comparisons, historians should establish the difference between demonic possession and the effects of witchcraft in English Calvinist thought. It is also necessary to distinguish rigorously between the psychological explanations employed by participants and those used by the historian.
Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch
1990, Social History of Medicine
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The belief that midwives were commonly persecuted as witches is widespread in the history of witchcraft and the history of medicine. Although the midwife-witch can be found in the writings of some demonologists, influenced by the Malleus Maleficarum, in few of the vast numbers of trials were midwives accused. The practice of midwifery required them to be respectable and trustworthy. Those who dabbled in medicine were occasionally accused but midwives were generally immune from witchcraft prosecution unless they fell foul of a zealous magistrate or there was some special local belief. Historians have been led astray by a tradition that derives from the discredited work of Margaret Murray. A few spectacular cases have been mistaken for a general pattern and midwife-witches have been seen where none exist. The history of witchcraft has been distorted but the history of midwifery has been completely unbalanced by this modern stereotype, which has served either to justify the rise of the men-midwives or to create a multitude of imaginary martyrs for the modern women's health movement. The myth of the midwife-witch is an obstacle to serious study of the history of midwives, women's health and the relationship between popular medicine and religion. The norm, that regular midwives were not prosecuted in ordinary witchcraft cases even if they did get dragged into some of the large-scales panics where any prominent person might be accused, has been generally accepted, though there are dissenters. It therefore becomes possible to identify exceptional cases and explore what made them different, and often highly contentious. It might be useful to explore the records of ordinary ecclesiastical courts and local secular ones, in search of irregular midwives, such as those involved in concealing illegitimate births, or those practising folk medicine and charms. Even though these cases may not have led to full blown witchcraft trials, with the threat of execution, they may well have contributed to the reputation of midwives in general.
Witches, Disgust, and Anti-abortion Propaganda in Imperial Rome
The Ancient Emotion of Disgust
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In The Ancient Emotion of Disgust, eds. Dimos Spatharas and Donald Lateiner. Oxford University Press, 189-202.
“From Goddess to Hag: The Greek and the Roman Witch in Classical Literature” in Dayna Kalleres and Kimberly Stratton, eds. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014 forthcoming) 41-70.
Old Women: Divination and Magic or anus in Roman Literature
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abstraCt. Migdał Justyna, Old Women: divination and Magic or anus in Roman Literature. Word anus was used in a primarily negative sense to describe an old woman. Anus is usually presented as a libidinous and hideous hag who indulges in strong wine or practices black magic, mainly for erotic purposes. Though Latin literature brings as well examples of a different type of anus: goddesses assuming the shape of old women to guide or deceive the mortals and old prophetic women, inspired by the gods. Anus can be gifted with divine powers and secret knowledge. The paper traces the motif of anus as a witch or a divine woman on the basis of selected examples from the works of Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Apuleius and Silius Italicus.
Women and the Transmission of Magical Knowledge in the Greco-Roman World. Rediscovering Ancient Witches (II)
The study of ancient magical female practitioners takes us, unavoidably, into the intersection of gender studies, ancient socio-political discourse and the problem of defining magic in the ancient world. Due to the scarcity of non-literary testimonies about women experts in sorcery, the information about ancient witches has to be inferred from indirect sources, that is, from literature. However, many scholars have rejected the validity of literary portrayals of sorceresses because of the undisputable interference that their gender and magic as a discourse of alterity has on the literary construction of these characters . Obviously, the real women who practiced magic could not "bring down the moon" as the ancient authors claimed but wasthere a real basis behind the ancient stereotypes? Were there actually women who practiced magic for a living? What were the sorceresses of the Greco-Roman world really like? Following an area of research conducted by scholars who accept the existence of a substantial number of magical purveyors of both sexes who offered ritual services of various kinds in the ancient world, my aim in this article is to analyse the literary depiction of ancient witches in contrast with the information offered from direct sources in order to clarify the image of these ancient women. On this occasion, in accordance with the nature of the volume in which this article is published, I will especially focus on those passages in which women appears involved not in the practice of magic, but in the transmission of magical lore in ancient literature with a special mention to the only testimony of PGM in which a woman appears as addresse of the magical knowledge (PGM IV 478-482).
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