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Author Brauner, Sigrid, 1950-1992, author.

Title Fearless wives and frightened shrews : the construction of the witch in early modern Germany / Sigrid Brauner ; edited with an introduction by Robert H. Brown ; foreword by Sara Lennox.

Publication Info. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [1995]
©1995

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe ACLS Humanities E-Book  Electronic Book    ---  Available
Description 1 online resource (xvi, 164 pages) : illustrations
text txt rdacontent
computer c rdamedia
online resource cr rdacarrier
Series ACLS Humanities E-Book.
Note Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 143-161) and index.
Contents The modern witch: concept, history, context -- The Malleus maleficarum: witches as wanton women -- Martin Luther: witches and fearless wives -- Paul Rebhun: witches and bad wives -- Hans Sachs: the witch lurking within -- Burning the witch to tame the shrew -- Appendix: sixteenth-century terms for witches.
Summary In fifteenth-century Germany, women were singled out as witches for the first time in history; this book explores why. Sigrid Brauner examines the connections among three central developments in early modern Germany: a shift in gender roles for women; the rise of a new urban ideal of femininity; and the witch hunts that swept across Europe from 1435 to 1750.
Brauner shows that the modern notion of the witch as a willful, conniving, promiscuous woman was first established by German Inquisitors in the Malleus maleficarum (1487). In subsequent works by Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century playwrights Paul Rebhun and Hans Sachs, the witch emerged as the counterpart to the new feminine ideal of the urban housewife. By demonstrating how the binary concepts of "good" housewife and "bad wife" (or witch) were propagated among the educated urban elite who presided over witch trials, Brauner suggests that the witch hunts functioned to discipline women who failed to display the docility and subservience expected of the new urban housewife.
Reproduction Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing, 2024. EPUB file. ([ACLS Humanities E-Book])
Note All rights reserved.
Subject Witchcraft -- Germany -- History.
Feminism -- Germany -- History.
Trials (Witchcraft) -- Germany -- History.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Added Author Brown, Robert H., 1952- author.
Lennox, Sara, writer of foreword.
American Council of Learned Societies, issuing body.
In: ACLS Humanities E-Book. http://www.humanitiesebook.org/
ISBN 0870237675 (alk. paper)
9780870237676 (alk. paper)
1558492976
9781558492974
9781685750572 (ebk)
Standard No. heb40172 hdl

 
    
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