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Larner and Hester comparison - Coggle Diagram

- - - - “Of those, mainly feminist, writers who have made male-female relations a part of their analysis of the witch-hunts, some argue that the witch-hunts were merely sex related, that ‘women’ are not the central issue, while others argue that they were sex specific, that ‘women’ are the central issue.”
      - “I will argue in agreement with the latter that the witch-hunts were sex specific, and that they constituted an integral part of conflictual male-female relations at the time.”
      - Rejects Larner’s “sex related” position. + argues that Larner’s formulation permits Later historians to marginalise gender. Acknowledges her contribution but this element is lacking.
        
        Christina Larner’s work, The Enemies of God (1983:83), is the most important work which argues that the witch-hunts were sex related rather than sex specific. Her analysis is a detailed study based on the Scottish witch-persecutions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with links made to the experiences in both Europe and England. She sees the question of why women formed the vast majority of the accused as important, yet only as an indirect feature of her analysis, concluding that witch-hunting, although apparently aimed at women more than at men, was not about woman-hunting (Larner 1983:92).
        
        Yes, majority of women are accused, but not straightfoward woman hunting,
        
        Complexity is introduced through a religious aspect.
        
        She accepts that the accused were women who presented a challenge to the patriarchally-defined ‘ideal woman’, because the timing of the witch-hunts fits in with the development of the new religious ideology which placed women in an ambiguous position. However, for Larner, this ideology regarding women was merely a part of a wider assertion of ideological conformity. The female witch stereotype does not provide the reason for the witch-hunts. Thus it is the imposition of what she calls the ‘Christian political ideology’ which is both more important, and makes the witch-hunts merely sex related but not sex specific”.
        
        She suggests that the establishment of the witchcraft laws in various European countries was another aspect of this process. The effect was ‘to centralize and secularize the process of social control in general and witchcraft in particular’. The witch-hunts were therefore a specific mechanism for the imposition of the new social order; a new Christian social order.
        
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        Patriarchal nature of religious ideology.
        
        Larner does accept that there is some evidence to suggest that the relationship between witch-hunting and woman-hunting is a direct one. Thus at the level of ideas, and specifically a strongly patriarchal religious ideology, there is a convincing link between witch-hunting and woman-hunting: ‘Witch-hunting is womanhunting or at least it is the hunting of women who do not “fulfil the male view of how women ought to conduct themselves"
        
        Hester about Larner: She recognises that accused women often challenged patriarchal expectations of proper female behaviour, but treats this as only one element of a wider demand for conformity rather than evidence that the hunts enforced male authority over women.
        
        H about L: What is perhaps odd is that, despite her insistence that the predominance of women as witches is important, and her emphasis on the patriarchal nature of religious ideology, she does not apply these ideas beyond her analysis of the witch stereotype.
        
        Since Larner’s careful documentation of the witch-hunts in Scotland it has been much more difficult for historians to ignore the importance of women as victims in the witch trials. But her work has also allowed many to avoid tackling the centrality of women to the witch-hunts (see Levack; 1987, Scarre 1987).
        
        Larner recognises that women formed the overwhelming majority of accused witches, but Hester argues that she treats this as secondary to her broader explanation of the hunts as an attempt to impose religious and political conformity. In addition, by calling witch-hunting merely “sex-related” rather than “sex-specific,” Larner fails to make women’s systematic persecution central to her explanation.
- - - - Larner also links witch-hunting to social control, seeing this form of social control as the most public form ever devised.
        
        Hester about Larner: It is surprising that she does not unite the different parts of her argument regarding the witch-hunts as social control, at the levels of both (gendered) national control over the populace and local control of women. After all, in Larner’s own terms the main direction of the control was towards women.
        
        That Larner keeps the different elements of her argument too detached.
      - Hester about Larner: here is no doubt that belief systems play a very important part in male-female, as well as other, social relations. What Larner does not allow for, however, is the material implication of such beliefs. In the case of belief in witchcraft, it is specifically men who may benefit because of the direct linkage between witchcraft and the female stereotype which she outlines. I would suggest that belief in witchcraft, as found in England (but also in Europe and Scotland) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, constituted a gendered ideology serving the material interests of male supremacy.