Lady Macbeth and The Daemonologie of Hysteria by Joanna Levin

Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria
Joanna Levin
ELH, Volume 69, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 21-55 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2002.0009
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/11556
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LADY MACBETH AND THE DAEMONOLOGIE OF
HYSTERIA
BY JOANNA LEVIN
Being a Phisition, and judging in my conscience that these matters

have been mistaken by the common people, I thought good to make
knowne the doctrine of this disease . . . to the end that the unlearned
and rash conceits of others, might be therby brought to better
understanding and moderation; who are apt to make everything into
a supernaturall work which they do not understand; . . . who are
ready to draw forth their wooden dagger, if they do but see a maid or
woman suffering one of these fits of the Mother, conjuring and
exorcising them as if they were possessed with evil spirits.
—Edward Jorden
What would you say, by the way, if I told you that all of my brand-
new prehistory of hysteria is already known and was published a
hundred times over, though several centuries ago? Do you remem-
ber that I always said that the medieval theory of possession held by
the ecclesiastical courts was identical with our theory of a foreign
body and the splitting of consciousness? But why did the devil who
took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them sexually and
in a loathsome manner? Why are their confessions under torture so
like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment?
Sometime soon I must delve into the literature on this subject . . .
—Sigmund Freud
Ever since Freud linked vexation narratives with “the communica-

tions made by my patients in psychic treatment,” comparisons
between the demonically possessed and hysterics have been legion.
But the use of “hysteria” as a scientific explanation for possession is
not just a twentieth-century phenomenon.1 As the Mary Glover Case
of 1602 reveals, the transformation of a bewitched demoniac into an
hysteric first occurred during the era of the witchcraft trials, and even
contributed to the decline of witchcraft prosecutions.2 A trial involv-
ing many of the leading religious and political authorities in Renais-
sance England, the case of an allegedly bewitched young girl named
Mary Glover sparked intense debate over the boundaries between
Joanna Levin21–55 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

ELH 69 (2002) 21
the natural and the supernatural and resulted in the first etiology of
hysteria written in English: Edward Jorden’s Briefe Discourse of A
Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603). Constructed as
a rational alternative to the occult, Jorden’s etiology maintained that
hysterica passio, or, as it was more popularly known, the “Mother,”
was a natural disease that could mimic the signs of demonic vexation.
The satanic force animating both the bewitched and witches alike
could thereafter be relocated within the female body, especially
within her sexual and reproductive functions.3
Historians of hysteria have traditionally praised Jorden’s skepti-
cism, hailing the Briefe Discourse as “the first book by an English
physician which reclaimed the demonically possessed for medicine.”4
This analysis supports the Whig argument that the “Scientific Revo-
lution” facilitated the end of witchhunting: as reason overthrew
superstition, the power of witches was exposed as a fantastic fiction,
and women were saved for medical science.5 Michael MacDonald
has recently contextualized Jorden’s achievement, however, noting
that “modern assessments of Jorden have misunderstood his motives
for writing his Briefe Discourse and the considerations that prompted
him to reassess the cause and symptoms of hysteria.” He argues
against the standard view of Jorden as a disinterested rationalist and,
tracing the progress of the Mary Glover Case, insists that Jorden’s
book was “in the first instance a work of religious propaganda” that
entered into the controversy between the established Church of
England and Puritan dissenters.6
This suggestive analysis sets the stage for a new inquiry into the
relation between demonology, the etiology of hysteria, and concur-
rent patriarchal ideologies. As the Mary Glover Case demonstrates,
the witch, the bewitched, and the hysteric were synchronic categories
brought together under the auspices of a complex struggle for
religious and political authority at the outset of King James’s English
reign. This contextualization argues against a view of the hysteric as a
reclaimed version of demonic femininity; positioned as antithetical
and analogous constructs, the demonic woman and the hysteric each
sought to explain “disorderly” womanhood, and to enforce (if also to
differentiate between) modes of masculinist control. Depending on a
topos of perverse or corrupted maternity/sexuality, the satanic female
and the hysterical mother existed on a close continuum, and the
Glover case exposes the contemporary nexus between the demonic
and the pathological.
22 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

Occurring through a rich confluence of political, religious, medi-
cal, and legal discourses, the transformation of the demonic woman
into the hysteric raises many questions for feminist analysis: how did
this shift affect the position of women in early modern Europe; how
do these patriarchal categories conceptualize (and manage) female
power and agency; and to what extent can we recuperate such
categories for our own feminist politics? Such issues focus Joan
Kelley’s provocative question in the title of her article: “Did Women
Have a Renaissance?”7 To be sure, scholars have traditionally agreed
that the decline of the witchhunts during the early seventeenth
century advanced the position of women. Since women comprised
ninety percent of those accused of witchcraft in England, they
presumably had the most to gain from scientific interventions.8
Recent studies of gender ideology in the English Renaissance have
complicated this Whig account of social change, however, in ques-
tioning whether women really gained more than they lost from the
disappearance of the witch. Arguing that witchcraft beliefs elabo-
rated a mythos of female power, many feminist historians and literary
critics celebrate the witch as the nonconforming figure who threat-
ened “hegemonic sex/gender systems.”9 Some even reveal a certain
nostalgia for the witch, maintaining that her disappearance accrued
to the greater triumph of male hegemony. Relying on a direct
correlation between belief in witchcraft and female power, such an
argument imagines that the end of witchcraft prosecutions meant
that female deviance, real or symbolic, had ceased to threaten male
dominance. In a neo-Foucauldian move from the prison to the
penitentiary, critics see the overt violence of witchcraft prosecutions
as giving way to new, more insidious, and totalizing strategies of
hegemonic control; women no longer appeared as witches because
new ideologies ensured that more and more would subscribe to
patriarchal expectations.
Several critics parallel the shift from violent persecution to hege-
monic cooptation with the transformation of the witch into the
hysteric.10 In a sense, this neo-Foucauldian reading duplicates a Whig
analysis: medical science does reclaim the witch—with the crucial
qualification that such a reclamation benefits patriarchy rather than
women. Marianne Hester elaborates this theory, arguing that a new
gender ideology expedited the end of the witchhunts by providing
“new, and more effective, means of controlling women by men,” and
she characterizes this “new ideology” as the changing “perception of
women from that of ‘powerful and threatening witch’ to that of
Joanna Levin 23
‘hysterical woman.’” “Sexually passive” and “domesticated,” Hester’s
hysteric “emphasizes women’s (subordinate) place in marriage.”11 She
is patronized rather than feared, consigned to an involuted private
sphere of sentiment, morality, and nurture; she consents to her own
subjection through the insidious workings of ideological belief.
Dympna Callaghan likewise argues that the decline of witchhunts
depended upon the production of a new ideology of femininity and
uses the figure of the hysteric to illustrate this development:
the witch in Jacobean culture had become the hysteric, a scientific

phenomenon rather than a disturbing threat to phallic power. The
modernity of this transformation is apparent in that it is identical to
Freud’s diagnosis of the witch. The witch had metamorphosed into a
new creature, the ailing nurturer at a time when childhood is
“discovered” and motherhood invented.12
For both critics, the hysteric signifies the woman who fulfills patriar-
chal expectations and suffers for it: she is an “ailing nurturer,”
asexual, domesticated, and non-threatening. But Jorden and Freud
did not share this vision of the hysteric. Indeed, neither Hester nor
Callaghan mention Jorden’s etiology of hysteria and its role in the
decline of witchcraft prosecutions; though both maintain that the
early seventeenth century witnessed the evolution of the witch into
the hysteric, they use the hysteric more as an overarching metaphor
for new ideologies than as a specific historical construction.
Without recourse to the intersecting contexts of the Glover Case
and Jorden’s etiology, these critics also discount the crucial, interme-
diary figure of the bewitched—a figure who triangulates the relation
between the witch and the hysteric, revealing the many continuities
between representations of demonic and pathological femininity.13 As
I will argue, the bewitched woman both qualifies the power of the
witch, throwing into relief the latter figure’s status (particularly within
the demonological treatises) as a mere servant of Satan, and also
exposes the extent to which hysterical passivity recapitulated rather
than neutralized the threat of female derangement, sexual openness,
and noxious mothering.
Returning these figures to the realm of contemporary discourse
and politics foregrounds their many similarities and demonstrates the
limitations of each category as a mode of feminist empowerment. As
Jorden’s etiology reveals, the diagnosis of hysteria involved many of
the same state-level power relations that had galvanized the

witchhunts, but which, for a variety of reasons, began to promote a
scientific alternative. Indeed, King James himself personifies the
shift from witchhunter to proponent of the hysteria diagnosis, alter-
nately conceiving of both roles as a proper expression of patriarchal
governance, and of both the witch and the hysteric as apt descriptions
of unruly femininity. Jorden’s etiology facilitated this politicized
transition from witchcraft to hysteria. Pragmatically designed as a
rational account of demonic women, his Brief Discourse absorbed
and promoted many of the assumptions about femininity already
inscribed within the demonological treatises. Far from being a
benign “ailing nurturer,” the early modern hysteric replayed the
contradictions of her satanic predecessors: she was both disorderly
and passive; she was a “disturbing threat to phallic power” and
(largely) a paternalistic construct; she was and was not a mother; she
was deceptive yet utterly somatized; and she both confounded
patriarchal authority and provided the occasion for its legitimation.14
Such contradictions also work themselves out in the figure of Lady
Macbeth, and she herself provides a further link between the
demonic and the hysterical. A history of hysteria is properly a
demonology of hysteria.
I. THE MARY GLOVER CASE, EDWARD JORDEN, AND THE
SUFFOCATION OF THE MOTHER
When a fourteen year old girl named Mary Glover accused her
neighbor, Elizabeth Jackson, of bewitching her, the conflict quickly
expanded to encompass multiple struggles for religious and political
power. Pitting Puritan divines against Anglican bishops, and Anglican
bishops against secular judges, the trial also divided the Royal
College of Physicians and ultimately required the intervention of the
newly ascendant King James.15 As the various parties struggled for
power and authority, the meaning of witchcraft and hysteria hung in
the balance. By the end of the trial in 1602, this unprecedented
marshaling of power and knowledge in English witchcraft prosecu-
tions had functioned to discourage future allegations of demonic
possession, to produce the first etiology of hysteria written in English,
and to popularize notions of the rapacious, hysterical Mother as a
substitute for bewitchment. Elaborated to meet the demands of a
specific court case, Edward Jorden’s etiology of hysteria fixed a new
category within medical literature, one that offered unruly sexual
desire and corrupted maternity as a rational answer to—and exten-
sion of—traditional demonology.
Joanna Levin 25
The trial of Elizabeth Jackson took place during a period of intense
conflict between the state-sponsored Church of England and Puritan
dissenters. Under the leadership of the Bishop of London, Richard
Bancroft, and his chaplain, Samuel Harsnet, the Anglican clergy
attempted to suppress dissident sects and to consolidate their power.
In their effort to discredit the opposition, Bancroft and Harsnet
focused their attacks on the practice of exorcism throughout the
1590s. Contrary to the official doctrine of the Anglican church, both
Catholics and Puritans claimed the ability to cast out devils: while
Anglicans maintained that such claims had no biblical foundation,
Puritans insisted that a passage from Mark (9.14–29) legitimated
exorcisms by ceremonies of fasting and prayer. Puritan divines
practiced these ceremonies throughout the 1590s, until their popu-
larity so alarmed the Anglican Bishops that Bancroft and Harsnet
accused the charismatic Puritan exorcist John Darrel of fakery.16
As Stephen Greenblatt has demonstrated, Bancroft and Harsnet
tried to demystify Darell’s exorcisms by characterizing them as forms
of theatrical illusion. Greenblatt separates the politics of exorcism
from the politics of witchcraft, however, and argues that “the same
state church that sponsored the attacks on superstition in [Harsnet’s]
A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures continued to cooper-
ate, if less enthusiastically than before, in the ferocious persecution of
witches.”17 But Greenblatt’s analysis does not take into account the
extent to which beliefs in diabolic possession and witchcraft over-
lapped, for the discrediting of exorcists necessarily involved the
demystifying of the witches who were often supposed to have
possessed the souls in need of exorcism.18 For Bancroft and Harsnet,
the Mary Glover case required such demystification. They ultimately
enlisted Jorden, seizing upon the hysterical Mother to undermine the
belief in witchcraft and bewitchment. Much like the discrediting of
Darrel, the demystification of Glover’s possession fulfilled an Angli-
can agenda.
The case of Mary Glover and Elizabeth Jackson quickly involved
the religious authorities who figured in the prosecution of exorcists in
the 1590s. The demonic possession of a girl from a prominent Puritan
family could not help but recall the Darrel case to Bancroft and
Harsnet. Mary Glover’s grandfather had been a victim of Marian
persecutions and had died a Puritan martyr. Her uncle, William
Glover, served as an alderman for the (predominantly Puritan) city of
London at the time of the trial.19 Thus, when Mary Glover accused
Elizabeth Jackson of bewitching her, the case virtually announced

itself as a trial of religious conviction, as a test of who could
determine and patrol the boundaries between the natural and the
supernatural. Mary Glover’s body became the focal point of this
contested terrain. Did the devil inhabit Glover, and, if so, did he
enter through the demonic pact he had forged with Jackson? Or
could medical science reinterpret the signs of diabolism?
Bishop Bancroft directly involved himself in the case. According to
one contemporary Puritan observer, when Jackson was indicted and
remanded for trial on 1 December 1602, only two physicians were
“served by writt (according to the maner of the court) to appeare that
day, and yeeld their opinions, touching Mary Glover’s case.” These
doctors apparently “affirmed that they estemed it a case which
proceeded of som cause supernaturall.” Yet, this observer notes,
“Against these, stood up Doctor Argent and Doctor Jordayne, two
Phisitions, with a certaine Doctor of Divinitie, men not served with
writtes for the Court, as the order is.”20 The presence of these
additional doctors most likely reveals Bancroft’s influence; as
MacDonald concludes, “they were, in effect, government witnesses,
procured by Bishop Bancroft.”21
Argent and Jorden failed to provide a convincing explanation of
Glover’s seizures, however. They equivocated between a diagnosis of
“passio hysterica” and a judgment that the girl was of “som minde of
dissimulation, and counterfetting.” Entertaining Bancroft and
Harsnet’s past explanation for demonic behavior (the belief that
possession was fraudulent) and also trying to provide a medical
alternative to traditional demonology, Jorden and Argent “gave no
man . . . any satisfaction at all.” Hysterica passio, Jorden and Argent’s
stated medical diagnosis, was of course the classical disease of the
female anatomy: Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates all elaborated a
view of the womb as an hysterical organism, roaming wildly within
the female form. Yet, completely somatizing the female conscious-
ness, hysterica passio struck many as being largely at odds with the
calculating “minde of dissimulation and counterfetting.”22 Their
ambivalence between two such seemingly antithetical possibilities
and their failure to produce a medical cure agitated the principal
judge, Sir Edmund Anderson, an arch anti-Puritan whose continued
belief in witchhunting operated at cross-purposes with the Anglican
demystification of possession. The jury found Jackson guilty, and she
was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and ordered to stand several
times in the pillory, the maximum penalty she could have incurred for
a first offense under the witchcraft statute of 1563.23
Joanna Levin 27
The conflict over the meaning of Glover’s fits did not abate. After
the trial, the moment Bancroft must have feared all along finally
arrived. Six Puritan divines, all supporters of the ill-fated Darrel,
convened at the Glover house to perform a “joynt humbling of
themselves before the Lord, in prayer with fasting, on her behalfe.”24
This ceremony, as subsequent accounts trumpeted, resulted in Glover’s
complete dispossession. A pamphlet war now broke out between the
Puritans and the Anglican Conformists, and it was this battle that
ultimately led to the publication of Jorden’s etiology of hysteria. It is
likely that Bancroft himself commissioned Jorden’s pamphlet: Bancroft
entered the book onto the Stationer’s Register, a task he usually
delegated to his subordinates, and, on his first page, Jorden acknowl-
edges, “I have not undertaken this businesse of mine own accord.”25
The very title of his pamphlet, A Briefe discourse of a disease, called
the suffocation of the Mother, written upon occasion, which have bene
of late, taken thereby, to suspect possession of an evill spirit, or some
suchlike supernaturall power, obliquely refers to the trial, and the
Puritan doctor Stephen Bradwell angrily insists that Jorden under-
took to write the pamphlet “at the request of L B [Lord Bancroft] of
Lond: (as som thinke).”26 It was not long before the pamphlet hit its
probable mark: on 22 July 1603, as he traveled to London for his
coronation, King James spent an entire day with Bishop Bancroft and
soon after granted Elizabeth Jackson a royal pardon.27
The pragmatic imperative behind Jorden’s etiology cannot be
overlooked if we are to understand the place of the hysteria diagnosis
in early modern England (and even in our own time). A medical
explanation of how hysteria could reproduce the symptoms generally
understood as signs of witchcraft and possession, Jorden’s etiology
functions as a rationalistic rewriting of traditional demonology. In-
deed, as delineated by Jorden, the etiology of hysteria shares many of
the assumptions about female nature that informed witchcraft accu-
sations and that allegedly made women particularly vulnerable to
bewitchment. Such a limited rewriting of traditional demonology
betrays its own impetus, its political need to ease the transition from
the supernatural to the natural: the foundation shifted, but dominant
conceptions of womanhood remained largely intact and compelled
acceptance through familiarity.
The Glover case effectively triangulated the witch, the bewitched,
and the hysteric, and Jorden’s etiology links the suffocated Mother to
both her satanic predecessors. Though the witch and the bewitched
were traditionally divided into malevolent agent and passive victim,

these categories were themselves connected by more than antago-
nism, and the etiology of hysteria foregrounds their similarities.
According to continental theories of witchcraft and demonology—
theories that King James helped to popularize at the time of the
Scottish witchcraft trials—the witch was little more than the servant
of Satan and did not have independent control over the supernatu-
ral.28 She differed from the possessed or bewitched individual in that
she had formed a voluntary demonic pact with the devil; the
bewitched had simply been deprived of her/his own will.29 Still, even
though witches were held responsible for their demonism in a way
that the bewitched were not, the difference between the two
categories narrows on closer inspection. Continental theories empha-
sized that the witch had been sexually seduced by the infinitely
persuasive devil, partially voiding her own agency; conversely, the
“fallen” nature of humankind, magnified by individual sin, increased
susceptibility to bewitchment, thus qualifying the innocence of the
demoniac.30 Further, as “weaker vessel[s]” after Eve, women were
thought to be more open to satanic influence than men—whether
they became witches or bewitched—and it is this passive, self-
betraying, sexually charged femininity that Jorden reconfigures as the
pathological.31
Like the woman open to demonic influence, the hysteric was
internally mercurial, unruly, and duplicitous. The basis for this
conception of female nature shifted from theology to biology, but the
vision remained largely the same: both natural and supernatural
categories promised to reveal the hidden truth of femininity, its latent
potential for disorder and deception. To be sure, the demonic woman
and the hysteric each deviated from patriarchal feminine ideals
insofar as neither category met the (ongoing) demands of “chastity,
silence and obedience.”32 Such deviance did not guarantee subver-
sion, however. The demonic woman and the hysteric violated patriar-
chal ideals, but they validated misogynist accounts of an essentially
corrupted female nature.
The construction of the demonic woman and the hysteric equally
depended upon an eroticized concept of feminine frailty and imper-
fection. 33 Following the Malleus Mallificarum, King James’s
Daemonologie explained the disproportion of female to male witches,
stating: “The reason is easie, for as that sex is frailer than man is, so it
is easier to be entrapped in these grosse snares of the Devile, as was
over well proved to be true, by the serpents deceiving Eve at the
beginning.”34 The Malleus made explicit the reason for female
Joanna Levin 29
weakness and susceptibility to devils, specifying that “all witchcraft
comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”35 Jorden’s
etiology of hysteria also postulated feminine frailty and sexual insatia-
bility. Drawing upon Hippocratic and Galenic sources, Jorden re-
garded hysteria as a uterine pathology based on the wandering womb
(hysterica passio, or, more popularly, the “Suffocation of the Mother,”
or just “the Mother”) and the bodily production of vapors. Just as
female frailty caused women to be more frequently entrapped by the
devil, so did “the passive condition of womankind” make women
“subject unto more diseases and of other sortes and natures then men
are.”36 And, along with the “authenticall authors,” Jorden connected
such feminine frailty with uncontrollable sexuality, maintaining that
sexual dissatisfaction or abstinence could unhinge the uterus (that is,
the internal Mother), causing it to wander and to emit noxious
vapors. While the Malleus Mallificarum asserted that “the defect of
inordinate affections and passions” led witches to have sex with devils
and to become demonic agents, Jorden wrote that unruly desire
inflamed the womb and “overthrew” the female will.37 In both
instances, sexual desire causes the woman to forfeit self-control—yet,
while the devil controls the witch in the demonological treatises,
Jorden’s etiology suggests that the desiring womb could itself domi-
nate the hysteric; in effect, the diseased “Mother” refigures and
internalizes the corrupting satanic force without. Thus taken to its
logical extreme, the Malleus’s contention that “the mouth of the
womb” was “never satisfied” underwrites Jorden’s etiology.38
In the case of both the demonic woman and the hysteric, “inordi-
nate passions” arose outside of marital relations. Witches were most
often found among unmarried women; bewitchment generally befell
unmarried teenage girls; and, according to Jorden, “furor uterinus”
primarily afflicted “young and lustie maidens” and the spinsters and
widows who “want[ed] the benefit of marriage.”39 Further revealing
the correspondence between the witch, the bewitched, and the
hysteric, these links suggest that each category was attached to
women who were relatively free from patriarchal controls; these
labels sought to explain inappropriate behaviors and expressions of
sexual desire. Indeed, several years after Jorden’s Briefe Discourse,
Robert Burton echoed the Malleus even more closely than Jorden
when he referred to “women’s unnatural, insatiable lust” and its
propensity to cause hysterical fits in “maids, nuns and widows.” 40
It is difficult to evaluate how these conceptions of female sexuality,
religious and medical alike, correlated with notions of female power

and agency. On one level, the idea of an uncontrollable female libido
would seem to overturn conventional gender stereotypes: aggres-
sively sexual instead of shyly demure, the demonic woman and the
hysteric (extreme versions of the alleged condition of female sexuality
in general) appear to invert the Aristotelian opposites of male activity
and female passivity. Since these opposites informed medical, legal,
and theological discourses throughout the Renaissance, such an
inversion would problematize the very foundations of sexual differ-
ence in early modern culture.41 Yet such a deconstructive reading of
Aristotelian opposites in Renaissance culture depends on an anachro-
nistic view of sexuality and gender, one that construes the sexual as
the active site of personal agency, choice, and will-power, and that
sees aggressive sexuality as a hallmark of masculinity. This anachro-
nistic view is consummately Freudian.42 During the Renaissance,
however, aggressive sexuality was generally associated with the femi-
nine, or with the “effeminate,” and with weakness of character.43
Regardless of how Renaissance men actually behaved, patriarchal
treatises often deemphasized male carnality in favor of glorifying
male reason. As the oft-quoted “Homily of the State of Matrimony”
stipulated, “the husband is the head of the woman, as Christ is the
head of the Church.” Rather than undermining the dichotomy of
male activity and female passivity, this construction of masculine
embodiment supported male claims to superior, more active intel-
lects—to being “puissante agents, or manlie men.”44 Conversely, the
aggressively sexual woman remained the passive victim of uncontrol-
lable bodily urges: in the words of the popular conduct manual, The
Mothers Counsell (1636), “wantonesse when it turnes to lust, in a
woman’s bosom, is an affront against reason, a furious and unbridled
appetite, which killeth all good motion in her minde.”45 As implied,
the mother must retain her counsel by controlling the sexual Mother
within.
Yet, though the demonic woman and the hysteric confirmed
patriarchal associations between women and carnality, they were also,
as the Mother’s Counsell reveals, “affront[s] against reason,” structur-
ally positioned as the antitheses of the masculine head. Patriarchy
may have used (or co-opted) their opposition as a means of self-
legitimation, but to see disorderly women as hegemonic inventions
designed to exalt male rationality begs the question of why the male
head felt the need to denigrate female corporeality in the first
place—or, more to the point, the need to enjoin the mother to keep
her counsel.
Joanna Levin 31
From Lear’s condemnation of the “sulphurous pit” burning within
the female body to Hamlet’s “Frailty thy name is woman,” misogynist
assertions have routinely depended on a cluster of threatening
associations linked to female sexuality and maternity. As Shakespearean
texts reiterate, the reproduction (and destruction) of life occurs
within the womb. Hysterica passio further attests to the potential
pathology of the uterus, and the female sexuality that it metonymizes.
The powerful conjunction of life and death figured in contemporary
accounts of the womb also has its corollary in the Renaissance
preoccupation with female wantonness and infidelity; in this male
nightmare, proverbial feminine weakness resists containment, rebel-
liously threatening patriarchal blood-lines and poisoning hereditary
transmissions. During the same era that witnessed intensified pros-
ecutions of witches, the pejoratives of “cuckold,” “whore,” and
“whore-master” appear in most of the defamation suits brought in
sixteenth-century church courts.46 Though these terms rarely figured
in witchcraft trials themselves, they help to explain how pathological
constructions of female sexuality functioned in patriarchal discourse.
Most concretely, female lewdness could result in adulterous affairs
and illegitimate births, and no (super)structural series of antitheses
could guarantee the direct transmission of a patriarchal inheritance.
Even if female sexual deviance supported the patriarchal system of
antitheses and fulfilled misogynist expectations, female reproduction
necessarily remained an intractable threat to the paternalistic ethos
of Jacobean England. Representations of both the demonic woman
and the hysteric foreground this threat, as well as the continued
effort to denigrate and manage the unruly maternal body.
Jorden’s libidinous hysteric corresponded to the sexually insatiable
witch, yet the strategies Jorden advocated for curing hysteria did
reveal new strategies of patriarchal control and authority. Witchcraft
prosecution had validated the state legal apparatus and (for a time)
the religion it strove to represent, but the hysteria diagnosis worked
to uphold an institution increasingly dear to the patriarchal state: that
of holy matrimony. Maintaining that “the want of the benefit of
marriage in such as have beene accustomed or are apt thereunto,
breeds a congestion of humors about that part, which increasing or
corrupting in the place, causeth this disease,” Jorden used hysteria as
the occasion to advocate marriage for those “strong and lustie
maidens” and widows who exhibited “furor uterinus.”47 A euphemism
for sexual activity, the phrase “the benefit of marriage” also legiti-
mates sexuality by assuming a marital context and, in so doing,

further idealizes the marital relation. Indeed, this phrase echoes the
Church of England’s Homily of the State of Matrimony (1563), which
refers to marriage as “this benefit of God.”48 Reflecting and reinforc-
ing a new, post-Reformation ideology of the private life, both texts
construe marriage as the basis of social, religious, and finally biologi-
cal order. This new construction of marriage represents a partial shift
from earlier sexual attitudes. As Mary Beth Rose remarks, “dominant
medieval homiletic and theological formulations officially idealized
asceticism and celibacy as the most prestigious forms of sexual
behavior; and Protestant sexual discourse explicitly and repeatedly
abjured this idealization and replaced it with the glorification of
marriage.”49 This glorification did not change views about non-
connubial sexuality, however, and within the etiology of hysteria
itself, feminine desire was simultaneously pathological, excessive, and
legitimate, depending on the context of its expression. The desiring
Mother could either “breed diseases” or children.50 These alterna-
tives naturalized the benefit of marriage, turned unwed female
sexuality into a pathological condition, and guaranteed the woman’s
physical dependency on a male.
Yet, like most witches, the hysteric represented the threat of what
could happen to women outside the bounds of the patriarchal family,
only validating the status quo as a negative example. For both the
witch and the hysteric, the epithet of Mother functioned ironically.
The trial records show that alleged witches were often designated by
this term—“Mother Grevell, Mother Turner, Mother Dutton, Mother
Devell, Mother Stile.” To be sure, within village convention, all
women who had once had children were referred to as Mother, even
after their children had grown. But, when applied to the witch, this
everyday convention became perverse: as Deborah Willis has argued,
villagers generally regarded the witch as a “malevolent antimother to
her neighbors and their children,” bringing “sickness and death to the
households of other mothers” and perversely misdirecting nurture
toward demonic familiars.51 More extremely, the Malleus also con-
structed the witches as satanic antimothers who made “unguents
from the bones and limbs of children” and were capable of cooking
and eating their own children.52
Similarly, although Jorden used hysteria to advocate marriage and
motherhood, it remained true that the category of the hysterical
Mother only stood for maternity by signifying its opposite: an
antithetical word in the primal Freudian sense, the Mother bound
the hysteric to her logical “contrarie.” Just as King James maintained
Joanna Levin 33
that “there can be no better way to know God, than by contrarie,” so
did the Mother proclaim a dialectical connection between maternity
and the barren womb.53 As we have seen, like many witches, a woman
afflicted with the Mother was medically not a mother at all, or at least
she had not had procreative sex for quite some time. Metonymically
connected to (and determined by) her wandering womb, the woman
suffering from hysterica passio was at odds with her own body. In
other words, the disease concept of the Mother naturalized mother-
hood by pathologizing its antithesis: the Mother was a creature
constituted by lack. The non-reproductive mother was thus not an
“ailing nurturer” (Callaghan’s description of the early modern hys-
teric) but a split subject, a disorderly woman who, whether by choice or
by fate, could not live up (or, more precisely, live down) to the demands
of the sexual role inscribed within (representations of) her body.
The supposition that the Mother resulted from sexual deprivation
and/or the absence of a fetus further complicated the relationship
between female sexuality and disorderliness. On one level, the
hysteric reinforced age-old associations between women and inordi-
nate, ultimately pathological, wantonesse and lust—the extreme lust
that allegedly made witches have sex with devils. On another level,
however, the hysteric was disorderly because she had not yet realized
her inherently sexual nature and generative function. Her perversity
doubled: she was both too sexual and not sexual enough. If, in
relation to the male libido, female sexuality was already imperfect
and diseased, women compounded the problem when they failed to
submit that sexuality to a reproductive aim and to an appropriate
male authority. Combining the unruly wantonesse of witches and
self-possessed Chastity, the self-divided Mother required medical
intervention and patriarchal governance in order to fulfill her predes-
tined maternal role.54
Represented as antimothers, both the witch and the hysteric
negatively sanctioned patriarchal control over female generativity
and nurture. During a period that witnessed increasing anxiety about
motherhood and the maternal body, the witch and the hysteric
became the inverse counterparts of the ideal mother. The pursuit of
such an ideal mother—a sanctified, Mary-like vessel of purity—
inspired post-Reformation efforts to regulate marriage and family
life. Throughout the sixteenth century, state and religious authorities
began calling for a host of regulations surrounding women’s caretak-
ing roles. The act of articulating desirable norms continually demon-
strated just how precarious these roles could be, however, and how

easily the ideal nurturer could become an antimother. Authorities
warned of the potential perils associated with the maternal body, of
the deformations that could occur within the womb and the conta-
gion that could be spread through maternal milk; the traditional
women’s network of midwives and wetnurses became increasingly
suspect as a conduit of evil magic, destruction, and disease; conduct
books proliferated, advising women how best to inculcate Protestant
morality and circumvent the curse of Eve; and finally, advice manuals
counseled mothers on how to negotiate the fine line between
affection and damaging indulgence.55 The witch and the hysteric thus
existed on a continuum of possible antimothers, alternately figuring
the extreme perversion of ideal nurture or the potentially anarchic
force of the womb.
Like the witch, the perversity of the hysteric also extended beyond
a denial of her maternal role, however. The Malleus had insisted that
a woman is “a liar by nature”—that is, she not only had a natural
predisposition to deceit but could also use nature for deceptive
purposes; she was one for whom bodily signs such as tears “may be a
snare.”56 Similarly, Jorden’s etiology also argued for the possible
consent of the female will in the production of her own bodily
symptoms. It was this assertion that had caused the Puritan doctor
Bradwell to allege that Jorden’s etiology had less to do with scientific
observation than with the Mary Glover Case. He insisted that Jorden
enlarged traditional etiologies only to incorporate Bancroft and
Harsnet’s belief in the fraudulence of many possessions: “If he sought
not to please him that sett him on worke, even in the maner of his
writing also, then can we not ceasse to wonder, to what end
counterfeiting comes in so often.“57 This rhetorical question points to
the fact that Jorden did not fully resolve the ambivalence he had
demonstrated in court: Jorden’s hysteric is both out of control and a
willful deceiver, both depraved and an actress miming her condition.
Just as Harsnet allowed that “a little helpe of the Mother, Epilepsie,
or Cramp” could aid fraudulent possessions, so does Jorden imply
that counterfeiting and the “strange and violent motions” of hysterica
passio could mutually reinforce each other.58 The demonic woman,
the hysteric, and the counterfeit thus formed a set of associated terms
along a chain of meaning. Just as hysteria intersected with demonol-
ogy, so did it overlap with theatricalized deception.
Yet the connection between hysteria and duplicity still obtained
whether or not the hysteric deliberately faked her seizures, for
hysteria itself signified a radical division between womb and self.59
Joanna Levin 35
Indeed, the etiology of hysteria scientifically legitimated the Spenserian
mythos of the beautiful woman stripped to reveal the noxious hag. In
this model, the corrupt vapors emanating from the womb repre-
sented the underlying Duessa (or wicked witch) that lurked within
every Fidessa. Jorden and Harsnet reinforced this link by maintain-
ing that hysterical wombs could aid fraudulent possessions. Addition-
ally, since misogynist accounts of the female will generally collapsed
the feminine mind into the body, the deranged hysteric determined
by her womb and the willful woman faking seizures were further
elided; as Joseph Swetnam’s notorious Ariangment of Lewde, Idle,
Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615) argued, the “aspiring”
female mind was itself marked by a “wanton will.”60 And if, as the
Mother’s Counsell maintained, “wantonesse in women” frequently
turned to “lust,” then the will that “abused” the “animal functions” in
Jorden’s Briefe Discourse may itself have signified a thoroughly
eroticized consciousness. In any event, Jorden made it clear that the
“perturbations” of the female mind were capable of producing a
concomitant “uterin affect.”61 Whichever way the determinism went,
the womb dominated the female mind and produced uncontrollable
lust; whether faking possession, illness, or subject to the diseased
yearnings of unfulfilled desire, the hysterical woman remained wanton,
capricious, passive, yet disturbingly sexual. She remained “possessed,”
only now she was controlled by her womb rather than the devil.
Far from being a docile version of the witch, the figure of the early
modern hysteric thus continued to embody the contradictions of her
predecessor. She modernized an ancient agenda and reinforced
misogynist accounts of weak, fragile, and passive femininity. But,
these terms did not yet signify domesticated, appropriately feminized
subjects; on the contrary, they revealed a continuing belief in the
potentially monstrous nature of female sexuality and reproductive
functions. As the concerted efforts of physicians over the centuries
have attested, the hysteric continued to alarm male authorities. She
was not put to death—and thus undeniably represented a material
advance for women, however we might assess the relative opposi-
tional power of the two figures—but she did prove the occasion for
such medically sanctioned tortures as clitorectomies and lobotomies
and for such patriarchal controls as compulsory matrimony. Freud
himself advocated Jorden’s own preferred cure, writing that a “nor-
mal kind of satisfaction” for women “depends [on] the possibility of a
hysteria being cured by marriage and normal sexual intercourse.”62

I have been arguing against the view of the early modern hysteric
as a figure of hegemonic co-optation, emphasizing the extent to
which the Mother retained many of the threatening qualities of her
predecessor—while also inspiring similar denigrations of the female
reproductive body and new strategies of social control. The similarity
between patriarchal representations of demonic femininity and hys-
teria begs the question of how each category was experienced by
actual women. As noted, the documentation necessary for thoroughly
addressing this question does not exist. We can imagine that some
witches enjoyed being feared and felt animated by supernatural
power, yet most probably felt themselves to be wrongly accused and
were terrified by the prosecutions.63 As for hysterics, it is possible that
some may have benefited from their sick role, temporarily absenting
themselves from the obligations of domestic life and receiving the
nurture that they themselves were supposed to dispense. On the
other hand, it is likely that some did in fact experience significant
physical/psychological distress (for a number of different reasons);
yet, rather than receiving a cure, they were thrust into potentially
undesirable marriages and/or made to feel ashamed of their bodies.
In any case, it is not clear that the label of witch empowered actual
women any more than that of hysteric—only that the earlier label had
more dire consequences. But however they were experienced by
early modern women, both figures share a compelling force: they
make visible the threat that the maternal/antimaternal body posed for
patriarchy.
How might contemporary feminists understand this threat? Just as
many feminist Renaissance scholars have celebrated the witch, other
feminists have upheld the hysteric (especially in her nineteenth- and
twentieth-century incarnations) precisely because of her maternal
capacity, her expressive body, and alleged ability to confound patriar-
chal discourse. Yet attempts to recover a primal, feminine sexuality/
generativity as a source of female power quickly encounter many
problems. As we have seen, the patriarchal order depended on the
rule of the head over the body, and the maternal order (under
patriarchy) depended on the rule of the body over the head. A
feminist inversion of body and head—as in the French Feminist
concept of l’écriture féminine or in the celebration of witches as
figures of the repressed body—can thus reproduce patriarchal logic
or even patriarchal understandings of female embodiment.64 Still, if the
continued need to stigmatize female sexuality is any indication, patriar-
chal logic failed to remove the insistent threat of the pathological
Joanna Levin 37
Mother, a threat that always somehow exceeded attempts at codifica-
tion, treatment, and control. The demonology of hysteria thus attests
both to the irreducible force of that maternal threat and to the
debasement of femininity that it provoked. Further riving Jorden’s
hysterical Mother, such doubleness figures the contradictions of
women under patriarchy.
II. LADY MACBETH, THE MOTHER, AND KING JAMES
Created three years after the publication of Jorden’s etiology, the

figure of Lady Macbeth herself intensifies the perverse doubleness of
the Mother. As the famous question, “How many children had Lady
Macbeth?” implies, the play leaves her status as a mother ambiguous.
Lady Macbeth admits that she has “given suck” (1.7.54), but her only
living children appear to be the “murd’ring ministers” who take her
“milk for gall” (1.5.49). Like the double-edged, pathological Mother,
she only breeds diseases and “unnatural troubles,” negatively inviting
paternalistic governance; she secularizes the maternal threat in-
scribed within the demonological treatises and ultimately validates
the patriarchal order through her very resistance.
In her persuasive reading, Callaghan argues that Lady Macbeth
enacts the transformation of the witch into the hysteric. According to
Callaghan, this historical shift unfolds during the course of the
narrative: Lady Macbeth begins the play by invoking evil spirits and
ends in a fit of hysterical somnambulism. For Callaghan, this tempo-
ral shift divides the “mother figure in patriarchy,” polarizing the
demonic matriarch and the benign mother, the witch, and the
hysteric.65 But the pathology of the hysterical Mother itself repre-
sents a split within the mother figure in patriarchy and, in particular,
points to tensions between maternity and female autonomy, between
procreation and sexuality, and between nurture and reproductive
capability. Further, as dominant representations of femininity came
to emphasize the good mother over and against the threatening
witch, the hysteric stood as an intermediary figure; combining
features of both prototypes, she exposed the instability of patriarchal
classifications.
Lady Macbeth occupies this intermediary space throughout the
play. She resists a splitting of the demonic matriarch and the secular
mother, and her narrative development figures the many continuities
between the witch and the hysteric. Whether she transforms into a
witch or exits as an hysterical somnambulist, she continues to
represent the vicissitudes of the wanton will and the desiring womb.

More overlapping than polarized, the demonic woman and the
hysteric are metonymically linked, and the transformation of Lady
Macbeth further elides the two categories. Lady Macbeth also
registers the liminal position of the Mother through her relationship
to the other female characters in the play. Unlike the Weird Sisters or
Lady Macduff, she never receives the title of witch or mother, but her
diabolism and reproductive functions (as well as the relation between
the two) are always at issue.
Although Lady Macbeth never obtains the epithet of witch during
the play, she would have been considered a witch according to the
Witchcraft Statute of 1604. Like its Elizabethan predecessor, the
Jacobean “Acte against Conjuration, Witchcrafte and dealinge with
evill and wicked Spirits” made the invocation of evil spirits a capital
offense. Whether or not the evil spirits actually materialized, the
conjuration of evil qualified as witchcraft. Thus, when Lady Macbeth
calls upon the evil “Spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts” (1.5.40–
41), her words become a performative utterance: the very act of
summoning demonic powers transforms her into the witch of the
1604 Statute. Yet, though her words would have been enough to
convict her of witchcraft under the law, they would not have satisfied
contemporary skeptics, or even a growing number of judges. Reginald
Scot defined the standard skeptical position in his Discoverie of
Witchcraft (1584), arguing that even if a woman wanted to give
herself to the Devil, she could not gain an influx of supernatural
power. Scot wrote: “My question is not (as many fondly suppose)
whether there be witches or nay; but whether they can do such
miraculous works as are imputed unto them.”66 Though most judges
and jurymen would not have gone so far as Scot in denying the
possibility of demonic witches, many began to question whether
there could “be assigned any proper token or sign to know that any is
essentially possessed.”67 To counter these epistemological anxieties,
the courts placed more and more emphasis on producing such
“proper tokens or signs” as devil’s marks and witches’ teats.
Shakespeare does not provide Lady Macbeth with any such sign.68
The evil spirits conjured by Lady Macbeth remain “sightless” (1.5.50),
and she is never more than “fiend-like” (5.8.69, my emphasis). No
ministering imps or demonic familiars appear as evidence of her
supernatural powers—on the contrary, her power inheres in her
natural (or “unnatural”) maternal capacities. As many have argued,
Lady Macbeth negates her maternal capabilities as she conjures the
evil spirits; seeking to “unsex” herself, Lady Macbeth asks the evil
Joanna Levin 39
spirits to undo such reproductive functions as the “compunctious
visitings of Nature,” the “milk” of “woman’s breasts,” and the femi-
nine “remorse” metonymically linked to these bodily processes
(1.5.41–49). Janet Adelman brilliantly complicates this reading, how-
ever, noting that even if “this imagery locates the horror of the scene
in Lady Macbeth’s unnatural abrogation of her maternal function, . . .
latent within this image of unsexing is the horror of the maternal
function itself.”69 Further, noting the links between witchcraft and
the powers of maternity, Adelman argues that the figure of Lady
Macbeth “rephrases the power of the witches as the wife/mother’s
power to poison human relatedness at its source.” For Adelman,
“Lady Macbeth focuses the culture’s fear of maternal nursery—a fear
reflected, for example, in the common worries about the various ills
(including female blood itself) that can be transmitted through
nursing.”70 Such fears speak to the close connection between mother-
ing and antimothering, to the ever-present danger of perverse
nurture: they substantiate Adelman’s assertion that Lady Macbeth
may not be asking the spirits to exchange her milk for gall so much as
she instructs them to take her milk as gall. Here maternal nursery is
itself figured as noxious and corrupting, analogous to the forces of
witchcraft.
The early seventeenth century witnessed much speculation about
the effects of maternal milk, and King James himself subscribed to
the belief that nursing could determine character. This notion even
enabled James to legitimate himself as an English monarch. Making
much of the fact that he had been nursed by a Protestant instead of
his Catholic mother, James stated before the English Parliament on
19 March 1603: “I thank God I sucked the milk of God’s truth with
the milk of my nurse.” However, James also blamed his inebriety on
his nurse, a known drunkard, and even attended a debate concerning
the various moral effects of nursing in 1604.71 The very fact that such
a debate occurred suggests that the Jacobeans did not unambivalently
connect nursing and the “milk of human kindness” (1.5.17). Maternal
milk could both nourish and destroy the morals of the hapless babe.
This understanding of nursing cautions against a view of witchcraft
as the absence of maternal capacities; rather, witchcraft extended and
elaborated dominant fears of noxious, perverse mothering. Just as
maternal milk could transmit pestilence and immorality, so could
witches suckle their demonic familiars and nourish them with evil.
When authorities searched women for signs of demonic contact, they
invariably looked for the bodily protuberances or witches’ teats used

for nursing devilish imps. Lady Macbeth thus conjures one of the
dominant images of devil worship when she invites the evil spirits to
nurse at her breast and offers her reproductive capabilities for
demonic ends. The contents of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth
further reveal the continuity between the monstrously maternal and
the demonic: within the cauldron, the Weird Sisters stir the “finger of
birth-strangled babe” (4.1.30). Strangled through the natural process
of birth rather than by the supernatural powers of the witches, the
“birth-strangled babe” suggests that witchcraft derives from the prior
horrors of maternity. Lady Macbeth explicitly conjures such horror,
invoking the terror of infantile dependency to convince Macbeth to
commit regicide; her willingness to dash the brains of “the babe that
milks me” becomes the topos of perverse mothering. Witches were
not the only women to threaten the patriarchal order.
The secularizing of the witch did little to undermine this threat. As
Lady Macbeth reveals, maternal figures could themselves appear
sufficiently fearsome. The very “power of the imagination,” often
invoked to counter accusations of diabolism, held its own dangers—
especially when it was linked to a maternal consciousness. As
Montaigne, a well-known skeptic (and long-acknowledged influence
on Shakespeare) argued: “It is very likely that the principall credit of
visions, of enchantments, and such extraordinary effects, proceedeth
from the power of imaginations.”72 Yet, if Montaigne doubted the
existence of supernatural interventions, he nevertheless assigned
uncanny powers to this secularized imagination. In particular, he
upheld the influence of the maternal imagination over sexuality and
reproduction, noting: “We know by experience that women transmit
marks of their fancies to the bodies of the children they carry in their
womb.”73
The common belief that the maternal imagination could deform
the fetus was inherited from antiquity, informed Renaissance trea-
tises on generation, and remained a respectable medical opinion
throughout the eighteenth century. Ambroise Pare, physician to the
kings of France, maintains in his Des monstres et prodiges (1573):
“The ancients who sought out the secrets of Nature (Aristotle,
Hippocrates, Empedocles), have taught of other causes for mon-
strous children and have referred them to the ardent and obstinate
imagination that the mother might receive at the moment of concep-
tion.”74 Montaigne records the results of such imaginative concentra-
tion and notes that there was “a girl from near Pisa, all hairy and
bristly, who her mother said had been thus conceived because of a
Joanna Levin 41
picture of Saint John the Baptist hanging by her bed.”75 Many
treatises further specified that the production of monstrous progeny
was most likely to occur when the maternal imagination was directed
away from the husband and towards an adulterous desire.76
If Shakespeare leaves Lady Macbeth’s relation to the supernatural
ambiguous, he nevertheless endows her with the maternal imagina-
tion thought capable of deforming a fetus. As Lady Macbeth goads
Macbeth on to murder, their interaction can be read as a sexualized
relation in which murderous intent emerges as the final product. Like
the woman who thought of John the Baptist instead of her husband
during copulation, Lady Macbeth adulterously directs her desire
away from Macbeth and towards an image of his future glory: “When
you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you
were, you would / Be so much more the man” (1.2.49–51). Produced
by Lady Macbeth’s maternal imagination, the monstrous Macbeth
becomes the offspring of a disorderly feminine imagination. In
Adelman’s words, Macbeth’s “bloodthirsty masculinity is partly a
response to Lady Macbeth’s desire, in effect an extension of her will,”
and, I would add, contemporary theories of generativity further
account for this horrific maternal transmission.77
A secularized witch, Lady Macbeth focuses dominant cultural
fears of the maternal body and imagination. She exposes connections
between witchcraft and maternity, and yet she is neither unambigu-
ously supernatural nor a literal mother; just as her imps remain
“sightless,” the “babe that nursed [her]” is never mentioned again.
Further, while the play resists a complete identification of Lady
Macbeth and the witches, the narrative also contrasts its villainous
heroine to the nurturing mother, Lady Macduff. As Callaghan
remarks, Lady Macduff provides a “new representation of maternality
in patriarchal ideology.”78 Indeed, Lady Macduff delineates emergent
notions of a moralized private sphere, notions that became increas-
ingly prevalent as Protestantism encouraged religious instruction
within the home. As she faces imminent slaughter, Lady Macduff
emphasizes her position within a self-contained, moral, and ulti-
mately ineffectual private realm: “Wither should I fly? / I have done
no harm. But I remember now / I am of this earthly world, where, to
do harm / Is often laudable; to do good sometime / Accounted
dangerous folly” (4.2.73–77).79 For most of the play, Lady Macbeth
acts as the antithesis to this ineffectual domesticity and instead
represents the full horror of earlier (and synchronic) conceptions of
maternity.

Like the Mother of Jorden’s etiology, Lady Macbeth combines
aspects of the witch and the mother figure in patriarchy into an
uneasy fusion. If her only recent children were the “murth’ring
ministers” and the murderous Macbeth, then contemporary medical
opinion would have regarded her womb as being particularly vulner-
able to hysterica passio. (Early Freudians would also have concurred
in this assessment. Isador Coriat opines, “Lady Macbeth’s hysteria
and somnambulism arose from a repressed wish for a child,” and
Freud himself also diagnoses Shakespeare’s tragic villainess, writing,
“Lady Macbeth’s illness . . . could be explained directly as a reaction
to her childlessness.”80) During a period that witnessed both the
decline of witchcraft accusations and a growing cultural emphasis on
the “consecrated mother,” the hysteric or Mother emerged as an
intermediary between the witch and maternal ideals; she registered
continuing anxieties about the maternal body and imagination, but at
a reassuring remove. Since a mother was precisely what a woman
with a case of the “Mother” was not, the disease-concept of hysteria
may have managed fears about the wandering (and potentially
noxious) womb, displacing them away from the reproducers of a
patriarchal lineage. The play parallels the doubleness of Jorden’s
“Mother” with the riddle about the man “not of woman borne.” In
both cases, maternity both is and is not present, and it is this
doubleness that ultimately validates the patriarchal order.
Lady Macbeth’s final somnambulism also corresponds to the
vicissitudes of the “Mother.” The play never mentions hysterica
passio, but somnambulism was in fact one of the symptoms of the
“Suffocation of the Mother.”81 According to Jorden, the hysteric
could become “depraved in too much wakefulnesse through the
commotion of the animall spirits, also in dreames, where sometimes
besides the deprivation of the fantasie they will walk, talke, laugh,
crye, &c.”82 But, as we have seen, Jorden primarily associated such
deprivation with unsatisfied desire, and Lady Macbeth herself con-
tinues to demonstrate signs of a domineering sexuality. Even in her
deranged, guilt-ridden state, she commands Macbeth to come to
bed, and her lines reveal the urgency of desire as much as “the
solicitous wife’s care for her husband”: “To bed, to bed! There’s a
knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand!
What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed” (5.1.69–72).83
These words, her last in the play, enunciate a half-sexualized com-
mand, and the femininity recuperated and constituted by her som-
nambulism remains a goad to patriarchal action.
Joanna Levin 43
Like Jorden’s etiology, Macbeth suggests that the Mother could
only be cured with the proper medical and patriarchal governance.
Of course, Lady Macbeth’s doctor does not diagnose the Mother and
even pronounces, “More needs she the divine than the physician”
(5.1.78).84 Still, it is a metaphorical physician who does the most to
control anarchic femininity and to reestablish “the grace of Grace.”
As the Scottish thanes observe on their way to meet the vanquishing
Malcolm: “Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal, / And with him
pour we in our country’s purge / Each drop of us” (5.2.27–29). The
analogy between the legitimate king and the physician reveals a new
privileging of rationalism, and a glorification of the doctor above and
beyond the warrior (or witchhunter.)
This analogy supports a James-centered reading of Macbeth, one
that sees Shakespeare imaginatively engaging Jamesian constructions
of Divine Right. James himself had justified his power by describing
himself as a physician, and, in a 1604 address, the newly crowned
King of England stated: “It is the King’s part (as the proper Phisician
of his Politicke-bodie) to purge it of all those diseases, by Medicines
meete for the same.”85 Rhetorically aligning himself with the physi-
cian, James fused a rationalistic discourse with the ideology of Divine
Right as he commenced his reign in England.86 In practice, James
also began to emphasize medical interventions to combat witchcraft
prosecutions and even promoted diagnosis of the double-edged Mother.
Once pardoning Elizabeth Jackson, James continued to use hysteria
as a diagnostic category and, after examining an allegedly bewitched
woman (in consultation with Jorden), James wrote to his son, assuring
him that “she was never possessed with any devil nor bewitched”—
instead, her malady was “occasioned by the disease called the
mother.”87
The transformation of the witch into the Mother thus operates
within the ideological parameters of a James-centered reading of the
play. Whether or not the play was first performed for James, as Henry
Paul speculates, recent critics maintain that even “if James’s ideas
were not a source, they provide an analogue, sharing and partially
determining the ideological terrain of Macbeth.” Witchcraft enters
the play, according to Peter Stallybrass, as a way of “developing a
particular conceptualization of social and political order,” one that
would resonate with (if also, as others have argued, complicate and
critique) Jamesian visions of Divine Right.88 James’s sponsorship of
the Scottish witchcraft trials of the 1590s, together with his
Daemonologie of 1597, elaborate a hermeneutics of order based on

the threat of inversion: within a Jamesian reading of Macbeth, the
witches thus appear as part of the “demonic opposition to godly rule”
that the rightful monarch must suppress in order to reveal his
legitimacy. The suppression of the witches in Macbeth occurs largely
through their consolidation in the figure of Lady Macbeth, however,
and the hystericized woman emerges as the exemplar of disorderly
femininity most in need of proper patriarchal governance. By the
time James assumed the English throne, he would have concurred in
this diagnosis. Fusing rationalism with the tenants of Daemonologie,
the Mother located the threat of inversion within the female body
itself.
Just as the persecution of witches had justified absolutist rule
during King James’s reign in Scotland, so the curing of English
hysterics provided another arena for patriarchal power and legitima-
tion. Indeed, the two reigns of King James demonstrate that each
category emerged as a means of exercising patriarchal power at
different historical junctures. But the transformation of the witch
into the hysteric did not in and of itself guarantee appropriately
domesticated female subjects. If Lady Macbeth and Jorden’s hysteric
are any indication, the absence of supernatural familiars did little to
negate the perceived power of the maternal/antimaternal body and
imagination. New forms of patriarchal governance—as well as to the
ongoing need to denigrate female sexuality and reproductive capaci-
ties—speak to the presence of that continued threat. Still, before we
move to celebrate what was once denigrated, we must be sure that we
do not recycle patriarchal constructions in the effort to reappropriate
an authentic version of femininity. We must not recapitulate the
Freudian move of taking the fiction of Lady Macbeth as the occasion
for our own diagnoses.
III. THE RETURN OF THE MOTHER
Because the sexually powerful Mother purported to split the

female subject—to divide both her mind and her body—hysterics
were not the “masters of [their] own affections” and could not control
their own anguish and desire.89 Lady Macbeth leaves the play in an
hystericized trance, still commanding but entirely absent to herself.
And when Macbeth voices his own self-estrangement, he links the
absence of meaning with “nothing”—that is, with female sexuality.
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his
hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by
an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing” (5.6.24–28).
Joanna Levin 45
Walking shadows, the player and the hysterical somnambulist em-
body illusions, and only partially control what they represent—
whether it be bloodstains, madness, or tragedy. Just as hysterics “will
daunce, and leape, and cannot endure to be quiet,” so does Macbeth
voice the sound and the fury of the actor.90 And, like hysterica passio,
Macbeth’s “nothing” refers back to the female body. As the bawdy
pun on “no-thing” suggests, female genitalia stands as the ultimate
signified, the locus of all reproductive power. Yet, identified as a
negation, that power is denied even as it is glimpsed.91
Recent literary critics and feminist psychoanalysts have sought to
reclaim this reproductive power and to celebrate the conjunction
between hysteria and the maternal body. According to Jacqueline
Rose, “the transition to a concept of hysterical discourse as some
privileged relation to the maternal body is easy; it is partly supported
by Freud’s own ‘suspicion’ that ‘this phase of [early] attachment to
the mother is especially intimately related to the aetiology of hyste-
ria.’”92 For some feminist theorists, hysteria thus speaks a somatic
language of pre-oedipal union with the mother (a union that women
supposedly retain a closer connection to), one that signifies a primal
realm outside of the rational phallogocentric order (no-thing be-
comes, in this analysis, an enabling irrationality); for others, hysteria
also expresses the hysteric’s own maternal drives.93 Yet, well before
psychoanalysis, the intimate connection between hysteria and the
maternal body was also supported by the history of the “Mother” and
the fabulous etiology of hysterica passio. It is precisely this history
that cautions against attempts to align the pre-oedipal, the maternal,
and the unconscious. As the legacy of the wandering womb reveals,
the pre-discursive maternal body may itself be mediated by all too
conscious paternal designs.94
A fantastic construction, the Renaissance Mother reveals the
difficulty of isolating a maternal drive or experience outside of (or at
least prior to) its cultural manifestations. This difficulty supports
Judith Butler’s argument that “what passes as ‘maternal instinct’ may
well be a culturally constructed desire which is interpreted through a
naturalistic vocabulary.”95 To make this claim may seem to endorse
Lear’s patriarchal lament (Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to the
Mother): “O! how this mother swells up toward my heart; / Hysterica
passio! down, thou climbing sorrow! / They element’s below” (2.4.56–
58). But rather than subduing the feminine, the effort to read the
Mother as a particular discursive formation resists its marginality and
any strict anatomical reference. However compelling as a figure for a

radical feminine alterity, the unruly, unsatisfied Mother must not
preclude either the non-maternal or the rational woman whose being
she putatively overwhelms, nor obscure the conditions of her own
production and reproduction. Only when the double-edged Mother
is returned to the realm of discourse and politics can the damage
done in her name be brought to an end.
Stanford University
NOTES
I would like to thank David Riggs and Christina Mesa for their careful reading and
generous insight.
1
As quoted from a 17 January 1897 letter, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 224.
2
Keith Thomas notes that the terms bewitched and possessed were virtually
interchangeable by the seventeenth century. Though “obsession by the devil” was
“not necessarily thought to involve the maleficence of some third party,” it was
“frequently believed that an evil spirit had entered into a victim because a witch had
sent him there.” See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles
Scribner and Sons, 1971), 478.
3
To be sure, though Jorden produced the first written etiology of hysteria in
England, skeptics like Johann Wier (De Praestigiis daemonum, 1563–1577), Levinus
Lemnius (Occulta naturae miracula, 1559), and Englishman Reginald Scot (The
Dicouverie of Witchcraft, 1584) had earlier argued that witches and demoniacs alike
did not necessarily have supernatural powers but instead suffered from either
melancholy (an excess of black bile that could produce a variety of morbid
conditions), or hysteria (the disease of the wandering womb and excessive sexual
abstinence), or even the melancholy brought on by hysteria. Yet the line between the
natural and the supernatural could once again be undermined (as Wier’s account
itself demonstrates) by “the theory that the devil usually chooses as his victims those
suffering from melancholic or hysteric delusions.” See D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits:
Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981), 10–11; see also Carol Thomas
Neely, “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s
Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 318–21.
Yet, the Mary Glover Case involved the first use of medical experts to examine a
demoniac in a witch trial (Walker, 79), and, as I will argue, Jorden was particularly
influential because of the political context that produced his etiology.
4
Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, quoted in Witchcraft and Hysteria in
Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case, ed. Michael
MacDonald (New York: Routledge, 1991), vii.
5
For a classic statement of this position, see Gregory Zilboorg’s The Medical Man
and the Witch in the Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1935).
6
MacDonald, viii.
7
Joan Kelly-Gadol. “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” in Becoming Visible,
Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston:
Joanna Levin 47
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 175–201. The fact that the witch-hunts were
particularly virulent during the early Renaissance should further complicate tradi-
tional periodizations, especially ones that would use such boundaries to mark the
progressive triumph of “civilization.”
8
This statistic is found in Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A
Study of Male Domination (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108.
9
See, for example, Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renais-
sance Drama (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 58.
10
Foucault himself, albeit writing of the eighteenth century, associates the
“hystericization of women’s bodies” with the socialization of the bourgeois “Mother.”
Like Callaghan and Hester, however, he omits the prior demonization of the
hysterical female body “thoroughly saturated with sexuality”—a demonization that
informs both early modern and eighteenth century etiologies of hysteria alike. Far
from being the ideal bourgeois Mother, the hysteric challenged the medical
profession with the problem of how to make the hysterical woman into the ideal
family benefactress. If idealized femininity shared some of the nervous susceptibility
of the hysteric, this correspondence does not render the two categories identical.
Indeed, some feminists persuasively read hysteria as both a product and indictment
of the traditional feminine role—even as an unconscious parody or “overmiming” of
patriarchal constructions of femininity. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction, Volume One (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 104; and Carol Smith-
Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 197–217; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist
Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985), 140.
11
Hester, 121, 145.
12
Dympna Callaghan, “Wicked Women In Macbeth: A Study of Power, Ideology,
and the Production of Motherhood,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from
the Twenty-First Annual Conference, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, N. Y. :
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 369.
13
This essay will focus primarily on patriarchal constructions of the witch, the
bewitched, and the hysteric, emphasizing the assumptions about femininity that
undergird each category. The voices of the actual women who were labeled witches
and hysterics are largely lost: as Carlo Ginzburg has said with respect to witches,
“The voices of the accused reach us strangled, altered, distorted.” Existing docu-
ments of witchcraft are largely derived from coercive confessions, prosecutorial
tracts, and demonological treatises; hysterics only speak to us through medical
etiologies. To be sure, while many witches were no doubt scapegoated, some
probably did invest themselves in the identity of witch and even practiced malevo-
lent magic. Similarly, while the etiology of the wandering womb has proven
fantastical, many of the women diagnosed with the “Mother” most likely did
experience some form of physical/psychological distress. Still, surviving documents
make it largely impossible to recount or compare the lived experience of the
individuals who were described (or who described themselves) as demonic women
or hysterics. We do have access to the ways in which accusers and doctors
conceptualized these categories and related them to contemporary gender ideolo-
gies, and this paper will address such representations. These documents are
primarily patriarchal, yet it should also be noted that, at least at the village level,
women were also among the accusers. See Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the
Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 10. For more on the difficulties of

gaining access to the voices of actual witches, as well as for various interpretations of
female accusers, see Deborah Willis, Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early
Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), 13–14, 22–23.
14
Callaghan, 369.
15
I will use the anachronistic term Anglican to designate the state church.
16
For an account of the politics of exorcism, see Walker, especially 43–81. See also
Macdonald, xix–xxvi.
17
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1988), 98. Similarly, in his more recent “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New
Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed.
Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993),
Greenblatt again emphasizes the differences between the conjunctions of power and
belief involved in witchcraft and exorcism trials, writing of the latter: “We are not dealing
with a situation comparable to exorcism in the 1590s, where the state and the church
decided to stop a controversial charismatic practice, a practice consequently branded
by institutional spokesmen as a kind of illicit theater” (118). It will be my argument
that the situation is comparable, in part because there is more commerce between
the politics of possession and witchcraft allegations than Greenblatt’s analysis allows.
18
Walker addresses this overlap, noting that “the connexion between possession and
witchcraft . . . was a major cause of the obsolescence of trials and convictions for
witchcraft” (78). Ordinarily, the court had to rely on hearsay in establishing that a
witch had performed various acts of malificium, but in instances of bewitchment, the
court could examine the demoniac and conclude that she or he was counterfeiting or
suffering instead from a natural disease. Though witchtrials involving possession
were not frequent, “the effect even of very few might be very great if they ended in
proving the witch’s innocence, a result that could not be obtained in any other way”
(Walker, 79).
19
MacDonald, xix.
20
Stephen Bradwell, Mary Glover’s Late Woeful Case Together with Her Joyfull
Deliverance (1603), British Library Sloane MS 831. The manuscript is included in
the volume edited by MacDonald, 26, 27. Bradwell was a member of the Royal
College of Physicians and a Puritan sympathizer.
21
MacDonald, xv.
22
Bradwell, 27 (“passio”; “som”; “gave”), 28 (“minde”).
23
Macdonald, xviii.
24
Bradwell, 30.
25
MacDonald, xxi. Henry Paul has a somewhat different interpretation of Bancroft’s
involvement in Jorden’s pamphlet (see Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth: When, Why
and How it was Written by Shakespeare [New York: Macmillan Company, 1950],
109 [“informed”], 107 [“propounded”], 99 [“a little”]). Edward Jorden, A Briefe
Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London, 1603), A-2.
Paul, insisting on Jorden’s scientific disinterestedness, argues that Jorden acted
independent of the ecclesiastical authorities. Indeed, somewhat implausibly, Paul
imagines that Jorden and Bancroft were at odds with one another, engaged in a
struggle between truth and ideology. Arguing against any alliance between Jorden
and Bancroft, Paul maintains that the fact that the bishop passed the pamphlet
merely “informed the bishop that people would soon be told that Mary Glover did
not counterfeit but was only a victim of hysteria. This was not the bishop’s view of
the case, and he wished that his book about counterfeit demoniacs be read before
Joanna Levin 49
judgment was passed on Dr. Jorden’s theory.” Thus, according to Paul, Bancroft
rushed the publication of Harsnet’s Popish Impostures, which appeared on the
Stationer’s Register two days later. Upholding Jorden as an enlightened luminary
who “propounded his rationalizing position which it was hoped might reconcile all
differences,” Paul does not entertain the idea that Bancroft might have been behind
the publication of the Brief Discourse, as well as Harsnet’s work. I tend to side with
MacDonald’s interpretation for the reasons already mentioned above and because a
diagnosis of the Mother did not necessarily invalidate Harsnet’s argument about
fakery—Harsnet himself mentions that fakers might be helped by some natural
hysteria, writing that “a little helpe of the Mother, Epilepsie, or Cramp” might teach
her role her eyes, wrie her mouth, gnash her teeth, startle with her body, hold her
armes and hands still, make anticke faces, grine, mow and mop like an Ape” (Paul,
99). Paul himself quotes this passage, yet it does not affect his belief that Jorden and
Harsnet were at odds in the pamphlet war. Also, I will later discuss the extent to
which Jorden echoes Harsnet.
26
Bradwell, 1.
27
Paul, 107, 111. In reconstituting the demonic as the pathological, the Glover
case and Jorden’s etiology undermined belief in witchcraft in several respects. First,
it enlisted the most powerful man in England in the effort to reconceive the meaning
of bewitchments. Second, without the ability to bewitch, the witches’ power became
increasingly suspect and/or resistant to proof. Third, if the demonic could actually
inhere within the female body, then witches no less than the bewitched could be
divested of their supernatural animation. Her morbid imagination could, authorities
increasingly believed, derive from the Mother itself or the “melancholy brought on
by menopause” (Willis, 92). Either way, the maternal body, whether old or young,
became the foundation for female disorder.
28
While state-level prosecutions initially codified village-level witchcraft beliefs
and provided legal, state-assisted recourse for traditional conflicts, legislators came
increasingly to rely upon continental demonology. As Willis demonstrates, village-
level witchcraft lore saw the witch as a quasi-independent agent whose evil derived
from a form of malevolent nurture; state-level prosecutions came more and more to
emphasize the continental demonic pact and to see witches as mere pawns of the
devil.
29
Describing a witch, James himself wrote that, “She seemed to draw nearer to the
sort of demoniakes or possessed, if that conjunction betwixt them [between herself and
the devil], had not bene of her owne consent” (James VI and I, Daemonologie [1597]
and News From Scotland [1591] [Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966], 29).
30
According to James, “there is no kinde of persones so subject to receive harme
of them [witches], as these that are of infirme and eake faith (which is the best
buckler against such invasiones:)” (49).
31
An Homily of the State of Matrimony (1563), quoted from Daughters, Wives and
Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500–1640, ed.
Joan Larsen Klein (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), 15. For a useful summary
of the continental witchcraft beliefs that influenced the English gentry and aristoc-
racy by the end of the sixteenth century, see Willis, esp. 83–158. For a comparison of
the witch and the demoniac, see Walker, 9–10.
32
For examples of patriarchal injunctions to “chastity, silence and obedience,” see
Klein.

33
As G. S. Rousseau notes in his own survey of early modern hysteria, the view of
woman “as the quintessence of frailty” surfaced in numerous discourses during the
Renaissance—medical, theological, and scholastic. “Woman,” Rousseau writes of the
early modern context, “continues to be conceptualized as part animal, part witch;
part pleasure-giver, part wreaker of destruction to avenge her own irrationality—
anything but as strong, rational creature resembling homo meniscus.” See Rousseau,
“A Strange Pathology: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800,” in Hysteria
Beyond Freud, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, Rousseau, and Elaine
Showalter (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 108.
34
Quoted from Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), 68.
35
Quoted from Witchcraft in Europe: A Documentary History, ed. Alan C. Kors
and Edward Peters (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 127.
36
Jorden, B–1.
37
Malleus Mallificarum, quoted from William Monter, “Protestant Wives, Catho-
lic Saints, and the Devil’s Handmaid: Women in the Age of Reformations,” in
Becoming Visible, 213.
38
Jorden, G-2. Malleus Malificarum, quoted in Kors, 127.
39
Walker, 16. Jorden, 19–20.
40
For a useful survey of the arguments and statistics supporting the thesis that
witches were most often found among single and widowed woman, as well as among
women who appeared “lewde and disorderly,” see Hester, 107–97. Burton, quoted in
Callaghan, 367.
41
In his influential book, Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur traces Renaissance one sex
anatomical models and argues that the notions of sexual correspondence implied by
such models prevented gender from becoming predicated entirely on sexual
anatomy. In the one sex model, the female contained all of the male bodily organs,
but did not have sufficient heat to push them outside of the body; consequently, the
organs remained trapped within the female. But, according to Laqueuer, it was the
lack of sufficient heat and not the phallus itself that reified notions of female
inferiority. As Laqueur argues, the categories of male and female were based on
Aristotelian “gender distinctions—active/passive, hot/cold, formed/unformed, in-
forming/formable—of which an external or an internal penis was only the diagnostic
sign. Maleness and femaleness did not reside in anything in particular” (135). As
Laqueur himself notes, however, there was also an alternative rhetoric of difference
that “proclaim[ed] the unique qualities of a woman’s body and the supposed role of
these corporeal attributes in determining women’s health and social standing” (108).
Discourse about the hysterical womb was of course one such account of female
uniqueness that corresponds to more modern notions of sexual determination. See
Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).
42
Freud even goes so far as to divide female sexuality into masculine and feminine
components, depending on the degree of aggressiveness; the gender of the sexual-
object; and on whether the libido centers on the clitoris (in Freud, a masculine
analog to the phallus), or the vagina (the appropriately passive receptacle). Indeed,
although sexual urges remain behind psychoanalytic etiologies of hysteria, Freud
sees the desire capable of producing hysteria in women as masculine, rather than as
normatively feminine; as Freud argues: “In general, the hysterical attack, like every
form of hysteria, in women recalls to action a form of sexual activity which existed
Joanna Levin 51
during childhood, and had at that time a pronounced masculine character.” Freud
thus sums up Victorian wisdom when he regards active, instinctual sexuality as
typically masculine. Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), 123–24.
43
As Alan Bray convincingly argues, the term “effeminate” did not signify what
modern regimes identify as either homo- or heterosexuality. Rather, in Renaissance
texts, “effeminacy is associated with luxurious living and sexual vice in general” (my
emphasis). Bray supports this more generalized usage by noting that the word was
employed in contexts that stressed both male-male and male-female desire. The
association between “effeminacy” and sexual vice also corresponded to contempo-
rary assessments of “inordinate” female desires. See Bray, Homosexuality in Renais-
sance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 130.
44
Homily, 19. Phillip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583), STC 23376. Eii.
45
Anonymous, The Mothers Counsell or Live within Compasse: Being the Last
Will and Testament to her Dearest Daughter (1636), STC 20583, 6.
46
Katherine Eisaman Maus, “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and
Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” ELH 54 (1987): 562.
47
Jorden, 15.
48
Homily, 14.
49
Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English
Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 3. See also Connecting
Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and
Jean H. Quataert (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 35–36.
50
Jorden, G–2.
51
Willis, 34, 33–34.
52
Malleus, quoted in Kors, 132–33.
53
James VI and I, Daemonologie (1597), quoted in Stuart Clark, “Witchcraft and
Kingship,” in The Damned Art, ed. Sydney Angelo (London: Routledge, 1977), 175.
54
On tensions within early modern notions of chastity, see Susan Frye, “Of
Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spencer in the House of Busirane,”
Signs 20 (1994): 49–78. As Frye argues, notions of Chastity as “self-possessed female
virginity” conflicted with attempts to “restructure chastity within the bounds of
marriage” (55).
55
Willis, 65–71.
56
Malleus, quoted in Kors, 117, 126.
57
Bradwell, 44–45.
58
Paul, 99.
59
With reference to Jorden’s etiology, Gail Paster also notes the remarkable way in
which Renaissance medical treatises conceptualize the womb as “a kind of quasi-
independent force in the female body, like an agent within.” Though metonymizing
maternal power, the womb, Paster observes, apparently controls the female bearers
of wombs. See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines
of Shame in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 175.
60
Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant
Women (London, 1615), B–1.
61
Jorden, 12, 15–16.
62
Freud, Fragment of An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora), in The Freud
Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989), 216.

63
Thomas—who argues that witches were often poor beggars who had been
turned away by their increasingly individualistic neighbors—only mentions one
context in which it might have been possible to see women as having benefited from
the label of witch. He suggests that the fear of witches might have encouraged
charity in some cases, though he qualifies this claim by stressing the extent to which
the apparatus of witchcraft prosecutions ultimately worked to discourage charity,
enabling villagers to rationalize their individualism (68). Catherine Belsey has
argued that witchcraft trials and accusations gave women the opportunity to become
both the subjects and objects of discourse (subjects insofar as trials provided women
with a forum for public speech); yet these brief moments of subjectivity (which
should be read in the dual sense—the subject is always already subjected) can hardly
be seen as being worth the price. See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy
(London: Methuen, 1985), 191.
64
For a useful summary of theories of l’écriture féminine, see Ann Rosalind Jones,
“Writing the Body: Toward and Understanding of l’Ecriture Féminine,” in Femi-
nisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and
Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1993), 357–71.
65
Callaghan, 363.
66
Reginald Scot, quoted in Thomas, 572.
67
This phrase belongs to John Manningham, a London preacher, and is quoted in
Thomas, 574.
68
Though Lady Macbeth may believe that she does have such a sign. She tries to
rub out her “damn’d spot” (5.1.35), and Gary Wills reminds us that, “The bloody spot
most feared by those suspected of witchcraft was the devil’s mark left on them when
they sealed their compact.” Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 87.
69
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in
Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 135.
70
Adelman, 137, 135. Despite the direct reference to the “Suffocation of the
Mother” in the title of her book, Adelman does not discuss hysterica passio in
relation to Macbeth.
71
These fascinating connections are provided by Paul, 388–89.
72
Montaigne, “Of the Power of the Imagination,” from the Florio translation of
1603. Quoted in Paul, 49.
73
Montaigne, “Of the Power of the Imagination,” in The Complete Essays of
Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), 75.
74
Pare, quoted from Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 13.
75
Montaigne, “Of the Power of the Imagination,” in Complete Essays, 75.
76
For a detailed discussion of the concept of the maternal imagination and its
influence on Renaissance theories of generation, see Huet, 1–56.
77
Adelman, 138.
78
Callaghan, 364.
79
On emerging conceptions of the private sphere, see Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean
H. Quaraert, Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 35–38; and Callaghan, 364.
80
Isador Coriat, Abnormal Psychology (New York: Moffat, Yard, and Company,
1914), 20. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 14 , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 322.
Joanna Levin 53
81
King Lear is the only Shakespearean play to use the terms hysterica passio and
the Mother interchangeably. Raging before the storm, Lear acknowledges the
presence of an unruly femininity within his own being: “O! how this mother swells up
toward my heart; / Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow!” (2.4.56–57)
82
Jorden, E–1.
83
The phrase is Peter Stallybrass’s. Stallybrass argues that Lady Macbeth leaves
the play an appropriately feminized subject under a consolidated patriarchal order.
See Stallybrass, “Macbeth and Witchcraft,” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell
Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 199.
84
Jorden himself might have concurred in this assessment, however; in his
etiology, Jorden argued that divines and ceremonies of “fasting and prayer” could
cure hysteria—not because they encouraged supernatural interventions, but because
they eased the “perturbations of the minde” (Jorden, 15).
85
Quoted in Paul, 391. Paul also states that Shakespeare had read these words,
though he does not provide any evidence to substantiate this claim.
86
The old (albeit persistent) view that James I intensified witchcraft prosecutions
in England has been amply discredited. He may have feared that his involvement
with witchcraft prosecutions would weaken his reputation with the more skeptical
British public (see Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular
Belief [New York: Blackwell, 1984], 15) and, as he came in line for the British crown,
he revoked all of the special commissions for the trial of witchcraft by a single
executive act (Paul, 80). On balance, prosecutions were fewer during James’s reign
than that of Elizabeth, and James kept his distance from the large-scale panic in
Lancashire in 1612 (Larner, 19). When James subsequently traveled through
Lancashire in 1616, he personally examined a boy who had accused fifteen elderly
women of witchcraft, declared him an impostor, and spared the lives of the nine
women who had not yet been executed (David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life. [Cam-
bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989], 244). The King’s skeptical attitude also seems to
have influenced legal prosecutors: a 1627 guide to grand juries complimented the
late King for his ability to uncover impostures and his knowledge of the illnesses that
might be mistaken for witchcraft (MacDonald, li).
87
Paul, 111, 122. Dr. Jorden himself became a favorite of James. We learn from a
medical history of 1677 that Jorden had “a good share in the affection of King James”
and that James “committed the queen to his care when she used to bathe” (quoted
in Paul, 103).
88
See note 25 for Paul. Stallybrass, 192, 201.
89
Jorden, 15.
90
Jorden, E–1.
91
Reminiscent of Freudian lack and penis-envy, Macbeth’s “nothing” further
reveals the correspondence between psychoanalysis and Renaissance texts.
92
Jaqueline Rose. Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso Books, 1986),
35–36. Rose is herself skeptical of any equation between the maternal and the
unconscious.
93
For cogent summaries of feminist readings of hysteria, only some of which
emphasize the pre-oedipal mother, see Mark S. Micale. Approaching Hysteria:
Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), 66–88;
Showalter, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender,” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, 286–344.
For more on French Lacanian Feminist connections between hysteria and the
mother, see Jones; and Nina Baym, “The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I

Don’t Do Feminist Literary Criticism,” in Feminisms, 163–66. Baym is quite
skeptical of attempts to “save Freud for feminism” and notes that “the pre-Oedipal
mother plays, in such thinking, the role that patriarchs always allot to mothers: she
shores up the father” (163).
94
Referencing both Freud and Shakespeare, Juliett Mitchell comes quite close to
replicating Jorden’s own analysis of hysteria: “Motherhood purports to fill in the
absence which femininity covers over and which hysteria tries not to acknowledge.
From their positions along a continuum, motherhood and hysteria, to have or have
not, to be or not to be, constantly question each other.” Mitchell, Women: The
Longest Revolution: Essays in Feminism, Literature, and Psychoanalysis (London:
Virago Press, 1984), 313.
95
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), 91.
Joanna Levin 55

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Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

ELH, Volume 69, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 21-55 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Being a Phisition, and judging in my conscience that these matters

Ever since Freud linked vexation narratives with “the communica-

Joanna Levin21–55 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

22 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

the witch in Jacobean culture had become the hysteric, a scientific

24 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

26 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

28 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

30 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

32 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

34 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

36 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

Created three years after the publication of Jorden’s etiology, the

38 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

40 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

42 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

44 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

Because the sexually powerful Mother purported to split the

46 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

48 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

50 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

52 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

54 Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria

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