Katie Howard

This chapter explores the parallels between early modern European witch hunts and contemporary online shaming campaigns, arguing that the comparison is politically valuable in uncovering how power, fear, and social control operate in tandem. The chapter outlines three key parallels: (1) both forms of mass blame misrepresent structural causes of unrest through the targeting of individual “bad actors”; (2) both are often incited or leveraged by charismatic elite figures as a means of sowing division among and aggression toward vulnerable groups; and (3) both function as mechanisms of social bonding, using public condemnation to forge group identity. At the same time, the chapter attends to key divergences, including the vastly different scale, structure, and rhetorical possibilities of digital space, and the recent co-optation and commodification of “witch” identity. Taken together, these comparisons shed light on the moral complexity of digital shaming and the need for more ethically reflective approaches to justice online.

This chapter explores the place of neurodivergence in feminist, queer, abolitionist, and decolonial worldmaking with a focus on the history and reclamation of witchcraft. The first part of the chapter lays out a theoretical framework, organized around the concepts of “tending,” “esoterism,” and “multiverse,” that supports a method of “reading through” witchcraft to subjunctive esoterisms accompanying it. The second section examines the role of “madness” or “hysteria” in feminist accounts of witchcraft by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Silvia Federici, and Kathleen Skott-Myhre, finding in them a “disjunctive” approach that downplays or disavows neurodivergence. The third section dwells with the poetics of JJJJJerome Ellis, whose Aster of Ceremonies offers a non-disjunctive mood for thinking about politics, knowledge, spirituality, and neurodivergence as co-constitutive of a world. The final section uses Ellis’s mood to speculatively make room for thinking about witchcraft’s history and future in a way that is feminist, spiritual, and affirming of neurodivergent worlding.

This chapter traces the figure of the witch in key theoretical texts that link capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation. In Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, the witch poses a sexual threat to the emerging capitalist social order, and her image goes on to inform scientific method and the ontological de-animation of nature. In Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, persecution of the witch shores up the process of primitive accumulation in Europe and the Americas (whereby elites accrue capital, land, and natural resources), as well as the obfuscation of feminized labor. While these works offer vital insights for feminist ecosocialist theory and practice, the essay argues for deeper reflection on the legacy of the “death” of nature. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Marisol de la Cadena, the chapter considers the divergent natures at play in recent land conflicts in Peru, where “modern” norms of knowledge strain to accommodate animate earth-beings and rivers who are relatives. Attention to these divergent natures might complicate what appear to be shared agendas in environmental justice movements, but such complexity does not preclude the possibility of political alliance and solidarity.

In her classic feminist text Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici provides an account of the punishment of witches in the seventeenth century as part of the burgeoning logic of capitalism and the disciplining of domains of women’s work. The Salem witch trials are an evocative example of these preoccupations in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. An enslaved woman, Tituba, stood at the center of the events. She was one of three women accused of enlisting young girls into witchcraft. The other two were also women on the margins: one a beggar, and one a lady who had betrayed her respectable status by marrying an indentured servant.

This chapter is an examination of recent best-selling fictions and television adaptations which portray the history of witchcraft, often using outmoded historical theses, and often falsifying the known life histories of actual convicted witches. The chapter argues that these fictions, marked by problematically eugenicist ideas of magic, and in one case by a very uncomfortable appropriation of the Holocaust, are ultimately unhelpful to Pagans because they falsify history and deny the real needs of the contemporary Pagan communities.

Cosmic feminism offers an alternative vision of subjectivity stressing the self-in-place in relation to a larger natural or spiritual order of things. There are many versions of this perspective, as there are of the other feminisms as well. Some authors appeal to the (selected) heritage of Native Americans, stressing women’s ancient wisdom that men have suppressed but not completely obliterated. Others invoke the traditions of ancient goddess religions and the heritage of witchcraft as sources of personal strength and creative power for women, and as validation of nurturance for women and men. Still others speak of a poetic bonding between women, other animals, and the earth, a bonding constituted partly by what men have made of us but not reducible to a residue of male power.

This chapter argues that the English enclosures, and more broadly the rise of agrarian capitalism, starting in late fifteenth-century Europe provide a relevant social background for understanding the production of many contemporary witchcraft accusations and the relation between witch-hunting and capital accumulation. I will clarify later in what sense I use the concept of enclosure. Here I wish to stress that land enclosures cannot explain the totality of the witch hunts, past or present. I agree with the prevailing view that witch-hunting requires a multicausal explanation, though I trace all of its underlying motivations to the development of capitalist relations. I also do not wish to suggest that the connection I establish between land enclosure and witch-hunting is a necessary one. It is only under specific historical conditions that land privatization produces a persecution of ‘witches.’ Here seems to be, however, a peculiar relationship between the dismantling of communitarian regimes and the demonization of members of the affected communities that makes witch-hunting an effective instrument of economic and social privatization. To identify this peculiar relationship is part of the purpose of this chapter.

The crimes to which Sibillia confessed were as follows. Already when young, every week, on Thursday night, she had joined Oriente and her ‘society’. She had paid homage to Oriente, not thinking that this was a sin. In the subsequent trial she specified that she would bow her head as a sign of reverence, saying, ‘Be well, Madona Horiente’; Oriente would answer, ‘Welcome, my daughters (Bene veniatis, filie mee)’. Sibillia had believed that every kind of animal communed with the society, at least two of each species, with the exception of asses, because they had carried the cross; should one of them have been missing, the entire world would have been destroyed. Oriente answered the questions of the society’s members, predicting future and occult events. To her, Sibillia, she had always spoken the truth: and this had in turn enabled her to answer the questions of many people, providing information and instruction. Of all this she had said nothing to her confessor. During the 1390 trial she pointed out that over the last six years she had attended the society only twice: the second time she had by chance thrown a stone into a certain stretch of water from which she was walking away; as a result she had no longer been able to go there. In answer to a question from the inquisitor, she said that in the presence of Oriente the name of God is never uttered.

This chapter explores the role of the witch and witchcraft in Afro-Cuban religious narratives known as patakís to argue that, unlike popular conceptions of the witch as an antagonist, Afro-Cuban female deities characterized as witches are important world-(re)makers and powerful neutralizing forces. The author focuses on the Afro-Cuban religion known as Santería and its deities called orishas. In particular, this chapter examines two of the religion’s most well-known female orishas—Yemayá and Oshún. Through analysis of their patakís, the author suggests that Yemayá and Oshún’s depiction as witches is not incidental to their divine nature but rather a characterization of the very mechanism through which they exercise feminist resistance against imbalance and injustice in the world.

This original interview with feminist theorist and historian Silvia Federici is conducted by Annie Menzel. In it, Federici discusses her scholarly influences; the role of, not just sexism, but ableism, ageism, racism, and colonialism in the patriarchal violence that characterized the witch-hunts; the contemporary resurgence of the witch-hunts related to land expropriation, the anti-abortion movement, and anti-immigrant sentiment; and finally, the role of popular resistance, especially in the Latin American context.

This chapter foregrounds the affective dimension of the Early Modern witch-hunts. Specifically, the author examines the important and overlooked role that envy plays in this moral, political, and psychological landscape in order to illuminate specific forms of affective injustice and resistance relevant for thinking about feminist agency. The argument relies on a reading of Silvia Federici’s Marxist-feminist analysis of the witch-hunts, highlighting the domination and impoverishment of women as significant forces driving the proliferation of envy. Against contemporary philosophers of envy who reject or disparage the forms of “spiteful envy” characteristic of the witch as morally and aesthetically ugly, the chapter argues that envy is diagnostic of the culture and conditions that characterized the witch-hunts, and that practically, it functioned as a subversive mode of resistance to those conditions.

This chapter draws from Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet to outline and explore key characteristics of the witch as a feminist political theorist. As a painter, sculptor, and writer, Carrington’s source base derives from myth, fairy tale, folk-lore, and vernacular women’s folk knowledge and features many witchy figures. This is key: to see the witch we may also have to explore places where political theory usually doesn’t look, to the realm of folk fairy tales that are often dismissed as “Mother Goose” stories, “old wives tales,” nursery rhymes, and bedtime stories. Here, witches still play starring roles. As this chapter shows, Carrington repositions, revises, and reclaims the power of the witch as an agent for political transformation and a world-builder for multi-species feminist community outside of misogyny and patriarchy. The Hearing Trumpet creates an alternative political imaginary where the voices that are often submerged speak their world-building spells, craft a community of empowerment, and draw from disavowed and denigrated forms of knowledge. Ultimately, this essay reads the witch as a world-builder, as a political theorist, working alchemically on the discipline itself.

The witch hunts of Early Modern Europe took place from about 1400 to 1780. In this era, an industry of publication was born, where men wrote, printed, and profited from manuals devoted to the identification, apprehension, interrogation, and execution of witches. Across the continent a new domain of expertise crystallized: demonology. But there were always dissenting voices. This chapter looks at a series of Early Modern thinkers whose skepticism about the existence of witches led them to issue moral condemnations of those who profited from publishing demonological texts. The focus is on two skeptical threads of discussion: the medicalization of visions and the public contagion of belief. These threads are used to explain the outcome of a curious case of a nun’s visions in seventeenth-century Tuscany. There, where an accusation of witchcraft might have been appropriate, we find a condemnation to solitude. This chapter argues, first, that the investigators in this case may have decided in the way they did because they were aware of the power and danger posed by allowing the nun to tell her story. And, second, that those who denounced demonology were renegotiating the terms of moral responsibility for spreading disinformation in light of the burgeoning era of print media.

Recent years have seen the resurgence and reclaiming of an unconventional political identity: the witch as a figure of power and feminist protest. Women (especially but not exclusively) are finding power in a category once vilified. Placards and t-shirts bearing the slogan “We Are the Granddaughters of the Witches You Couldn’t Burn” are popular at feminist protests and witches across the globe are coming together in mass actions—to hex Donald Trump and the instigators of the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building, for instance.