Roper, well known for her early book on early modern witches Oedipus and the Devil and The Witch in the Western Imagination continues with a much deeper analysis of specific issues relating the witch-craze to family, gender roles at the village level, the history of childhood and the psychology of torture from both the interogrator's and the interogated's points of view. She divides the book into four topical sections by which to analyze her sources: "persecution": looking at witchcraft from the socio-political and cultural landscape of the counter-reformation and moving into the specific practices and legal narratives of judicial torture); "fantasy": deconstructing three key tropes that were essentially invented in this period and are deeply connected to larger problems of early modern epistemic shifts: cannibalism, sex with Satan and the witch's sabbath); "womanhood": diving into the importance of female fertility (the luscious young witch) and the fear sterility and barrenness (the withered crone) and the dyad that these two archetypes create in the visual and literary imagination of the time; finally, "the witch": three chapters that look at cases illustrating motivations - or the changes in motivations in direct relation to changing ideas of witches as the early modern becomes the age of Enlightenment. As in her earlier work Roper employs a range of methods and theories drawn from psychoanalysis, gender theory, visual culture studies and concerns with the history of the family and women's changing roles in the family structure.
Reviews of "Witch Craze"
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