Elspeth Whitney, Witches, Saints, and Other “Others”: Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture. Women in medieval Western European culture, Garland Publishing, Inc. New York, 1999 – Article.

 

            As naturally gendered organisms, human beings have forever questioned the relationship between the sexes. In the middle ages, the dichotomy had progressed so far as to suggest that one sex (male) represented good and the other (female) was prone to evil. In her essay, “Witches, Saints, and Other ‘Others’: Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture,” Elspeth Whitney makes two major assertions: first, that medieval women are included in, if not the majority of, prominent deviant communities; and second, that there are inverse parallels between witches and female saints.

            The first observation that Whitney makes is that evil or deviant communities in the middle ages either included, or were totally compiled of, women. There were four major “Othered” groups during the Middle Ages: witches, heretics, lepers, and Jews. The only thing that these communities have in common is that they all are excluded from the norm of Christian life. Therefore, all four groups, though different amongst themselves, were all accused of the same evil deeds because they fit into the “outsider” category (298). By the late medieval period, “accusations of infanticide, sexual perversion, ritual cannibalism, and obscene and scatological practices had coalesced into a powerful image of evil applied to a variety of different groups” (299). Witches and heretic groups were both assumed to “worship the devil” among other acts, while both lepers and Jews were “because of fear of ‘pollution,’… unable to touch food in the marketplace” (298). Exclusion of the four was both total and systematic. Why women were supposed to make up most of these “outsider” groups rests on the fact that medieval culture “rested on the… twin pillars of the pagan classical world and Christianity” (303). Therefore, most medieval thinkers were acquainted with Aristotle, who said “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior” (304). Aristotle based the inferiority of women on biological ideas, that women were cold and wet while men were hot and dry, and therefore women “lack[ed] the power to concoct semen out of the final state of the nourishment because of the coldness of its nature” (304). It is important to note here that the Greeks saw women as passive incubators for the male sperm while it formed a child. On the other pillar of Christianity, women were not faring any better. For the medieval church, “the biblical Eve came increasingly to symbolize the inherent physicality and sinfulness of women, Adam the innocent victim of a conspiracy between the devil and the first woman” (307). The inclusion of Adam as an innocent victim is a dangerous idea in a “persecution society” such as the medieval period. Prominent men came to see themselves as victims of deviant females who, in their “outsider” groups, did everything from consuming children to worshipping the devil (300).

            Whitney’s second assertion is that in the middle ages the lives of witches and female saints made inverse parallels. First of all, both were prominent in society. In the early middle ages, witches were a peasant’s superstition. However, in the 1450s, “officials of the church, who earlier had dismissed stories of… witches as merely fantasies… began to accept the reality” (301). In 1486, the famous witch hunting pamphlet, Malleus Maleficarum, was first published, consolidating the already emerging idea of the female witch. The stereotype of witch was “increasingly sexualized… at times verging on the pornographic” as the witch became solidly female (301). Her frightening sexuality made her a popular example of evil to both the clergy and medieval thinkers. The female saint was also prominent because “the late Middle Ages saw both a dramatic increase in the absolute number of female saints and an even more striking increase in the number of women saints relative to male saints” (309). These numbers suggest that female spirituality saw a dramatic increase during the period and that “women seem to have been prominent in… many orthodox religious movements” (309). There also arose a number of “highly visible female mystics” whose teachings were as prominent as those of male mystics (309). In fact, these females “frequently became public figures, speaking publically and even, occasionally… influencing papal politics” (310). Second, both were said to be capable of the same magical activities. Whitney notes that, “both are known to fly or ‘levitate,’ to control natural forces, to find lost objects, to tell the future, to read minds…” (310). Also, like the peasant’s early idea of a witch who chose to do good or bad to her neighbors, “saints, in the interest of sanctity, hurt, as well as helped, people” (310). Third, both were persecuted for parallel reasons. Whitney notes that a society’s choice of targeted deviants tells us “about a society’s cultural anxieties” which was, in the case of the Middle Ages, women (299). She adds that “the emergence of the female witch as an object of fear and loathing almost certainly reflected increasing ambivalence about gender and gender roles” (300). Therefore, the persecution of witches put to bed male anxieties about sexuality. The same type of threat led to the increased persecution of female saints. Because men saw women as a sexual temptation drawing them away from religious faith, “female sanctity embodied, in male eyes, an inherent contradiction” (311). An increased distrust of female saints occurred and many of them were put on trial for heresy. Because of the parallel witch trials, men could only see female faith “in negative terms as possession not by God but by Satan” (311). Probably, the parallel between witches and female saints was visible and unsettling to medieval men.

            The idea of the woman as a deviant and a witch was so intensely imprinted into people’s minds that “not until the eighteenth century did the figure of the witch lose its power to invoke the powers of ecclesiastical and secular governments” (302). In fact, the last execution of a witch didn’t occur until 1782. Both of Elspeth Whitney’s assertions, that women made up a large part of “outsider” groups, and that witches and female saints drew startling parallels, show a larger political force at work: the need of men to assure the submission of women to themselves. The fear of powerful or evil women loomed so large in their minds that a “moral panic” was eminent (299). Therefore, it was the “Othering” of women by those in power that led to their frequent portrayal as deviants.

 

Lauren Orsini, University of Mary Washington