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The Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period
Author(s) -
De Blécourt Willem
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0424.00185
Subject(s) - witch , period (music) , citation , history , early modern period , cultural history , sociology , law , classics , art , political science , economic history , ancient history , ecology , biology , aesthetics
One day in the early decades of the seventeenth century, a farmhand and a shepherd in Rheden, a village north-east of Arnhem in the Dutch province of Gelderland, performed divination by sieve and shears. They let their contraption turn around while naming the women of Rheden one by one by their name and nickname. Whoever was named when the sieve turned and came to a full stop was proven to be able to bewitch. In this way they discovered that every woman in the village qualified as a witch, with the exception of three. This caused quite a stir and the two men were heavily fined. 1