Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early

Modern Europe by Heidi Breuer (review)

Michael Heyes

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 9, Number 2, Winter 2014, pp. 235-237
(Review)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2014.0018

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/562482

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 Reviews 235

in so doing she has produced an excellent introductory survey for uninitiated

readers.

john henry
University of Edinburgh

heidi breuer. Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe. New York: Routledge, 2009. Pp. xii  190.

In the preface to her work, Heidi Breuer writes about the need to make
information accessible to the nonspecialist, inviting general readers to see her
work as play, and issuing a call ‘‘to enjoy the interpretive act.’’ Crafting the
Witch follows through on this invitation, or promise, making use of a prose
style that is at once lively, interesting, and informative. While the lucid prose
makes Breuer’s work eminently accessible to a broad range of nonspecialist
readers, including students, specialists in literary genre and gender will also
no doubt find Crafting the Witch to be interesting as well.
Much like Diane Purkiss’s The Witch in History, Breuer’s book focuses on
illuminating the origins of a popular conception of witchcraft, that of the
‘‘wicked witch.’’ Specifically, Breuer mines the pages of Arthurian literature
(with some Shakespeare for spice) in order to analyze the trends that led to
the green-skinned antagonist of The Wizard of Oz. As such, her work moves
chronologically from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the sixteenth
with frequent jaunts into the modern period to contextualize her findings.
After her introduction, Chapter 2 begins with Breuer’s analysis of the
Arthurian stories written by Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey
of Monmouth, and Layamon. Breuer argues for a gender-binary in the effects
of magic in these works: prophecy and transformative magic is masculine,
while healing and household magic is feminine. The texts work to under-
mine the threat that masculine power posed to the feudal patriarchy, by con-
demning those with overdeveloped masculinity. Rather than a mainstay
villain, the witch is seen as a positive healing figure, despite her relative mar-
ginalization as a rarely used character.
‘‘From Rags to Riches, or The Step-mother’s Revenge’’ focuses upon
two staple tropes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Arthurian literature:
the churlish knight and the loathly lady. In regard to the first trope, Breuer
focuses on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Greene Knight, The Turke and
Sir Gawain, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and The Carle of Carlisle, while
the analysis of the latter concentrates on John Gower’s ‘‘Tale of Florent,’’

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236 Reviews

Chaucer’s ‘‘Wife of Bath’s Tale,’’ The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Rag-
nelle, and The Marriage of Sir Gawain. Here Breuer offers a thought-provoking
conclusion: the use of transformative magic in these works, rather than being
associated with masculinity, is frequently the province of the now-emerging
‘‘wicked witch.’’ Even more interesting is that this witch is often a step-
mother, who reflects anxieties about expanding economic opportunities for
women in the time period in question.
Crafting the Witch’s fourth chapter addresses Malory’s Morte Darthur; Spen-
ser’s The Faerie Queene; and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mac-
beth, and The Tempest. Of primary importance to Breuer’s argument is the
treatment of maternity in each work: both Spenser’s condemnation of mater-
nity as grotesque and maternity’s absence from Malory’s and Shakespeare’s
works. Breuer ties this preoccupation with maternity once again to the eco-
nomic changes detailed in the previous chapter. From this preoccupation,
two figures emerge: the beautiful temptress (embodying the prematernal) and
the crone hag (embodying the postmaternal). These figures represent the
potential wielders of this new economic power (that is, unmarried women
and widows), and their warped or absent maternity a lack of governing mas-
culine power (through marriage).
Finally, Chapter 5 addresses the prosecution of witches in England. Breuer
argues that this prosecution emerges from the maternity-witch tie: if witches
are antimothers, then those who are not mothers—or not good enough
mothers—are witches. Breuer suggests that the staying power of the wicked
witch has nothing to do with her magic. Rather, the gender conflicts created
by capitalism continue to feed the wicked witch’s relevance in modernity
and thus her survival as a trope.
Overall, it is difficult to find major faults with Crafting the Witch. One
complaint that might be lodged is that Breuer fails to define exactly what she
means by ‘‘witch.’’ However, Breuer does engage a significant discussion of
the gendering of magical practice and the divine/demonic and natural/occult
poles. Through this discussion the reader acquires a vague idea that when
Breuer refers to ‘‘bad/wicked witches’’ she is referring to women who make
use of magic that is characterized as demonic and/or destructive, while ‘‘good
witches’’ harness divine or natural/occult powers for beneficial effect. While
references to demonic and natural powers are frequent enough for the reader
to understand the thrust of Breuer’s argument, they do complicate the use of
words such as ‘‘witchiest’’ or the assertion that although witches were
‘‘clearly available’’ to the authors surveyed in the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies they ‘‘rarely used them.’’ This lack of orienting definition could also
be said to extend toward Breuer’s comparisons to ‘‘witches’’ in modernity,

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problematizing the comparisons that Crafting the Witch makes. On the other
hand, an argument could be made that the majority of Breuer’s analysis is
interested in Medieval and Early Modern literature, and that her comparisons
to the modern day are merely grounding her detailed scholarly work in order
to make it ‘‘relevant’’ for her readers—particularly to the lay audience that
she is attempting to include in the conversation.
Despite these minor quibbles, Crafting the Witch is an enjoyable and valu-
able contribution to the analysis of Arthurian literature and conversations
regarding the gendering of magical practice in the Middle and Early Modern
Ages. Breuer has written an engaging work that does a good job of capturing
the imagination of her readers—both lay and scholarly—and raises interesting
questions about the persistence of the ‘‘wicked witch’’ trope into modernity.

michael heyes
Rice University

owen davies. America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix  289.

In one sense, American historians have always known that witchcraft con-
tinued after Salem; there was the swimming of Grace Sherwood in 1706,
Tenskwatawa’s witch trials among the Delaware in 1806, and the phenome-
nal success of Starhawk’s Spiral Dance in 1979. More generally, however,
Americanists have no patience with modern witchcraft, having determined
that the bits and pieces of continued witch beliefs (such as the above episodes,
but also including African-American conjure, himmelsbriefs, Lovecraftian
magic, dozens of Hollywood films, and other artifacts) cannot be cobbled
together into a continuation of magic. 1692 is therefore the stamp and the
seal of American witchcraft; it passes its warning to humanity and reassures
historians working after 1700 that they need not bother about witchcraft.
Unfortunately, ‘‘we now know of more people killed as witches in
America after 1692 than before it,’’ according to Owen Davies in America
Bewitched, his nigh-comprehensive look at post-Salem witchcraft (3). It is not
merely that people continued to believe in witches, Davies argues, but that
they continued to kill witches. Davies carefully documents three centuries
of witch prosecutions and persecutions—primarily as recorded in American
newspapers—in an effort to reorient historiography of both America and its
witches.
The data provided is the strength and the substance of the work. Working

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