In Memorium Maleficarum: Feminist and Pagan Mobilizations of the Burning Times

Abstract

This chapter considers the popular afterlife within feminist circles of the academically discredited thesis of early modern European witch-hunts as explicit gendercide, denoted by the epithet ‘the Burning Times’. Through its adoption as a ‘useful past’ within feminist and contemporary Pagan communities, this version of history provides an intimate martyrology which both explains emotional dissatisfaction with present conditions and motivates political action for future change. This project analyses the emotions of history, the emotions stimulated and sustained through the recollection and memorialization of imagined pasts.