Work, Gender and Witchcraft in Early Modern England

The Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period

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 a...

Casebooks in Early Modern England:

Casebooks are the richest sources that we have for encounters between early modern medical practitioners and their patients. This article compares astrological and medical records across two centuries, focused on England, and charts developments in the ways in which practitioners kept records and reflected on their practices. Astrologers had a long history of working from particular moments, st...

Bedeviling Spectacle: Law, Literature, and Early Modern Witchcraft

The physician and witchcraft in restoration England.

THE YEAR of 1660 witnessed important political and scientific developments in England. The restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England occurred with the return of Charles II after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the Puritan influence. The Royal Society, after informal meetings for nearly fifteen years, was established as a scientific organization in 1660 and received its Royal...

Gender differences in the licensing and practice of female and male surgeons in early modern England.

This paper will examine differences in the roles played in the practice of surgery by males and females associated with the Barber-Surgeons Company in seventeenth-century London. It will also look at the ecclesiastical licensing process as it related to the licensing of male and female surgeons.1 The evidence will show that gender differences in both the guild and ecclesiastical routes to becom...