Of Blood and Milk:

Gender and the corruptive body

in early modern English witchcraft

Journal of Dracula Studies 22, no. 2

(Forthcoming, Spring 2020)

Leyla Pavão Chisamore

Queen’s University
Department of History
Kingston, Ontario
 Chisamore 1

Of Blood and Milk: gender and the corruptive body in early modern English witchcraft

It is July of 1645 and an Essex woman lays in bed at night, suckling the small thing at her

breast. She will do this daily because she must. Some promises may not be broken. She strokes

its head and finds it soft. For many, it is a small black dog. As rumour follows, others a squirrel

or a hare. Elizabeth Clarke’s imps however, had names: Sacke and Sugare, Pyewackett, Vinegar

Tom, Grizzel Greedigut... Two of these she shared with Anne West down the road.1 When it is

done, this thing familiar to her leaves a mark – a teat of sorts in its reddish-purple. This mark

would serve as both payment and reminder of her covenant with the devil, nurtured nightly as a

mother might feed her child.2

Formally accused by neighbour John Rivet on 21 March 1645 for the unnatural sickness

of his wife the winter prior, Elizabeth Clarke was arraigned for the crime of witchcraft.

Deposition records of witchfinders Mathew Hopkins and John Sterne report Clarke produced

these imps in their presence during an interview in her home. While evidence was predominately

local testimony, it was precisely these suckling marks for which she was inspected. They, as with

the majority of accused witches in early modern England, were found “about the lower parts of

her body.”3 The body was the site of contestation articulated in its capacity for the literal and

ideological corruption of individuals and the world at large.4 This nature was concerned with the

body and its markings as signifiers of connection with witchcraft. Its corruptive nature was

informed by gendered understandings of the female body as predisposed to sinfulness and thus,
1
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations, examinations,
and  confessions of the late  witches,  arraigned  and executed  in the county of Essex,
(London: Printed by M.S., 1645), Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 November 2019.
2
Darren Oldridge, ed. The Witchcraft Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 2008): 278-9.
3
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the severall  informations […] in the county of
Essex, 6.
4
Merry E. Weisner, ed. Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Boston; New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2007): 186.
 Chisamore 2

demonic intervention.5 This translated to evil transmitted by the witch’s mouth and its most

dangerous organ, the tongue. I am concerned not only with the gender and body of a witch itself

but further, the role of the witch in early modern hierarchy and its anti-thesis. I argue the early

modern woman, designated as producer (of children, of household, of faith) we see inverted in

the characterization of the witch constructed primarily through the corruptive body.6

The case of Elizabeth Clarke is one of numerous deposition records which occurred

during the English witch-panic of 1645-7. The cases informing this study however, range from

1601-1649. All bear a similar title for their widespread readership: “A Strange and Most True

Report,” “A strange and most true trial,” “Witches lately arraigned.” With exception of a

singular German record of 1601, these works were published in London and sold for widespread

readership. Trials were of public concern and contributed to existing anxieties in the public

sphere. The majority of these cases involve six accused on average, while others recount

eighteen to thirty. As evidentiary practices become more stringent in the period, trials were

centred around fewer examinants with extensive depositions by local witnesses. For Elizabeth

Clarke, this meant her own trial witnesses included visiting witch-hunters, accusing neighbours,

and those female neighbours arraigned alongside her. Some of these accused, such as Anne West

with whom she supposedly shared impish familiars and “hath been suspected a Witch many

yeers since,” Clarke incriminated through her own confessions.7 Clearly concerns of witchcraft

were long-standing even at a local level, but why were suspected individuals such as West,

5
Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: a translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De
secretis mulierum with commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992): 1,
67; Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion: the discourses of magic and witchcraft in
early modern France and Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 49;
Sarah Ferber, “Ecstasy, Possession, Witchcraft,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren
Oldridge (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 230.
6
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign bodies and the body politic: discourses of social pathology in
early modern England. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 120.
7
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the severall  informations […] in the county of
Essex, 4, 7.
 Chisamore 3

Clarke, and others tried in spring of 1645 rather than years earlier? Not unlike the preceding

continental panics peaking during the Reformation, it is this same context we find in early

modern English trials with the Civil War. Public anxieties increased with distributed records

contributing to the climate, and concerns began to incorporate political-theological threats to the

body politic.8 These evils manifested in satanic infiltration through the corruptive body of one’s

local witch.9

The worldview framing the context of this witch-panic was an early modern cosmology

which structured the heavens and earth in the intricate hierarchy found in the medieval

inheritance of the Great Chain of Being. This divine ordering of the world also informed its exact

opposite. Evil was not only demonological intervention but an active and disruptive force.

Binaries of good/evil, order/disorder, and a very real church/ antichurch dominated the early

modern imagination. Printed in 1487, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (The

Hammer of the Witches), reformed witchcraft in the early modern imagination as a formal

ceremony with the Devil and his demonic representatives. This developed a singularly structured

anti-Church through which already susceptible individuals converted to witchcraft.10 Through its

theological lens, witchcraft was understood through this exclusive binary as the Malleus

develops: “a heretical anti-religion, dedicated to the worship of an embodied principle of evil in

the cosmos”.11 For the Continent these fears manifested in the anti-Mass, wherein the Witches’

Sabbath involved debauchery, copulation with the Devil, and sharing stewed children. It

included a mirror desecration of the sacramental communion: “The witch enters a covenant with

Satan who mark her and draws blood; the Devil then provides a familiar who regularly sucks
8
Harris, Foreign bodies and the body politic, 107-8.
9
Harris, Foreign bodies and the body politic,121.
10
Herzig Tamar, “Flies, Heretics, and the Gendering of Witchcraft,” Magic, Ritual, and
Witchcraft 5, no. 1 (2010): 57.
11
Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (London:
Yale University Press, 2017), 27.
 Chisamore 4

blood from the resulting wound, drawing it into a teat this inverted Eucharist is designed to ‘put

her in mind of’ the original transaction.”12 In other examples, the witch was said to desecrate the

Host itself by theft and trampling by night.13 This blood-giving is not only an inversion of

sacrament; it is also an inversion of proper gendered behaviour whereby the domestic body

serves as the concrete intermediary between evil and its growth in the world.

It is these frameworks which were reached and reshaped in the context of early modern

England. Unlike their continental counterparts, English witches did not have a Sabbath of their

own and instead individually engaged with the devil or their society of witches in their homes

locally, often at night. Rebecca West was arraigned for witchcraft in Essex of 1645, with the

devil arriving “when she was going to bed, the Divil appeared unto her againe in the shape of a

handsome young man, saying that he came to marry her.”14 That same year, deposition records

of Joan Cariden of Kent record the Devil came to her “in the shape of a blacke rugged Dog, in

the night time, and crept into the bed to her [and] the next night it came to her againe, and

required this examinant to deny God […] and he would revenge her of any one she owed ill will

to.”15 In all of these, the devil in the shape of man or animal would suck from a teat to confirm

the transaction. In many of these records, the devil’s consumption is replaced with a demon,

called an Impe, in the form of a small animal who will suckle the accused. The covenant and

marking however, are maintained becoming definitive of English witchcraft. It has been

suggested this anti-Mass is translated to reflect the puritan experience, mimicking its Protestation

Oath and Solemn League Covenant. Witches were commonly said to have entered into ‘a solemn
12
Bejan, Mere Civility, 252-5; Larner, “Was Witch-hunting Woman-Hunting?” in The
Witchcraft Reader, 278-9.
13
Hans Broedel, “The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft,” in The
Witchcraft Reader, 45.
14
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 2.
15
Anonymous, The examination, confession, triall, and execution, of Joane  Williford, Joan
Cariden, and Jane Hott, 3..
 Chisamore 5

league’ with the devil.16 This appeared only in the later deposition and trial records examined in

this study, with the peak of English witch-panics approaching 1645-7 and thereafter.17

The Civil War continued and fears ran high. In his work on England’s corresponding

witch-panics, Witchfinders: an early modern English tragedy, Malcolm Gadskill recounts: “In

August [of 1642] Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, branding his opponents ‘rebels’ in

response to Parliament’s declaration that royalists were ‘traitors’. The battle-lines were

ideological, even metaphysical, the fighting thought to mirror the conflicts of the celestial sphere,

where Christ would vanquish the forces of evil. […] For puritans, these really were the last days

of mankind, the war was an actual prologue to Armageddon, and the king was a real agent of

Antichrist.”18 And so witchcraft came to be another force to be eliminated in the course of the

war, purging illness from the body politic.19

It is precisely this intersection of the body, gender and witchcraft with which I am

concerned. While currently movements in witchcraft scholarship reveal increasingly

intersectional and gendered concerns, extent historiography – predominately the foundational

texts of the 1970s and 80s – are limited in gendered analysis. Hugh Trevor-Roper in his essay

“European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (1967) and Keith Thomas

with his 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic, pointed toward larger categories of deviancy

and “unassimilable” social groups. This emphasized witchcraft as a created ‘reality’ framed

through the good/evil dialectic of the early modern mindset. It is in this way women were

amalgamated into a wider anti-social category of analysis. Witchcraft gained legitimacy but it is

in the push-back of theorists such as Larner who asserted primacy of gender, citing statistical
16
Malcolm Gadskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005): 3.
17
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 2.
18
Gadskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, 22.
19
Gil Harris, Foreign bodies and the body politic, 107, 121.
 Chisamore 6

studies and imagery/language overwhelmingly directed at female witches. She highlights gaps in

the canon at the time which negated the validity of gender as a category of analysis and

emphasizes patriarchal control over women’s body and reproduction, citing gendered power

dynamics as the core of witchcraft persecution.20 Likewise, Diane Purkiss in her 1996 book, The

Witch in History, outline the role of women in the domestic sphere and the witch as a subversion

of this.21 It is this work on early modern gender dynamics, social roles, and Purkiss’ emphasis on

the corruptive anti-Mother/anti-Wife of the Witch, that informs my work presented to you today.

For medieval and early modern medical authorities, the tongue was a signifier of health.

Pores were regularly examined for swelling. Packets of tea were rubbed on it for healing.22 If you

raised it to find unnatural colour, then illness was afoot. Perhaps it is appropriate then, that the

tongue was of concern to the body politic. The body itself served a role in the hierarchy within

the Great Chain of Being. The biblical phrase from proverbs (18:21) appears with frequency:

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

Erasmus, writing Lingua in the eight years after Martin Luther’s Theses, complains about

sectarian vitriol: “‘Love your enemies…and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.’…

Good God, how far they are from this rule, when they slander the undeserving with harmful

tongues?”23 The tongue was central in the production of instability and inevitably disorder. In

1656 Kent, an accused witch made just that accusation. The record states: “She further saith that

20
Christina Larner, “Was Witch-hunting Woman-Hunting?” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed.
Darren Oldridge (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 175.
21
Diane Purkiss, “Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the
Body, the Child,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Merry E. Weisner (Boston; New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 179.
22
Jack Hartnell, Medieval Bodies: life and death in the Middle Ages ( New York: Versa, 2018):
75.
23
Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: disagreement and the limits of toleration (Cambridge;
London: Harvard University Press, 2017): 23.
 Chisamore 7

Goodwife Dadson, Joan Argoe, William Arges wife, Goodwife Cox have very bad tongues”.24

This meaning they were also ‘in solemn league’ and actively corrupting the community in which

they reside.

Erasmus goes on to introduce its paralleling sexual corruption: “the tongue and the genitals

[are] the two most rebellious organs.”25 And it is the established susceptibility of women to

sinfulness – in language and sexuality – which makes them dangerous to the social body. Just as

the Malleus notes a woman menstruating might poison a child with a glance or tarnish a mirror, a

woman’s tongue was likewise poisonous. In volume two of the Harleian Miscellany (or, a

collection of scary, curious, and entertaining pamphlets and tracts), there is an essay titled On

the Anatomy of a Woman’s Tongue. While the original was printed in 1638 – prior to the witch

panics of the 1640s – the print version I worked with was from 1744. The work saw five reprints

within its initial five years and continued to be published over a century later. A woman’s

tongue, the anonymous author writes, is divided into five parts: a medicine, a poison, a serpent,

fire, and thunder. I would like to draw attention to the coding of proper gendered behaviour. A

woman would be capable of stopping her husband from vice and maintaining the household. The

tale ends as such:

So with such Words as these she did prevail,

For she poor Heart neither scold not rail:
And her kind loving Words were not in vain
For he was never after drunk again,
O happy Men that do such Wives enjoy,
Whose Tongues are Medicines to cure Annoy.26

24
Anonymous, A true relation of the araignment  of thirty witches  at  Chensford [sic] in
Essex, 5.
25
Carla Mazzio, "Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England." Modern Language Studies 28,
no. 3/4 (1998): 101.
26
E. Harley Oxford and Oldys, W., The Harleian miscellany, or, A collection of scarce,
curious, and entertaining pamphlets and tracts (London: Printed for T. Osborne, in Gray’s-
Inn, 1744), 169.
 Chisamore 8

The proper role of a woman as discussed earlier, is doting wife and pious mother. The tongue

was a signifier of illness and as the popularity of this collection suggests, possessed the capacity

for spreading social illness likewise. With the potential to heal, a woman’s tongue gone awry as

with witchcraft, might be inverted to corrupt. A woman’s tongue defined as poison reveals just

this:

For she would tell all her Husband did,

From her Gossips nothing should be hid,
If he sometimes did come Home drunk to Bed,
About the town it should be published.27

The titular Serpent speaks for itself in biblical analogy and more directly aligns with the evils of

a corruptive body to be wrangled, as Erasmus emphasizes. The section on Fire draws parallels to

this sinfulness and so extension the potential for witchcraft:

And that one told him, being a Scholar great,

That a Woman’s Tongue it is the Devil’s Seat;
And that this is a most pernicious Lyar,
A Backbiter and a consuming Fire.28

Evil was a real, corruptive presence which was introduced and spread by the tongues of

witches and those people whose sinfulness encouraged demonic intervention. Emblems were

produced expressing these concerns in the public sphere directly [Fig. 1]. Medical frameworks of

the woman’s body in De secretis underscore this potentiality. Despite the real presence of evil in

the world, the physicality of demons was a frequent point of debate. Earlier periods suggest they

functioned as spirits to influence a person of ill-health and appear in or controlling visions before

them.29 Walter Stephens posits was this engraving by Schongauer (produced circa 1480-1490) an

early example of the emerging corporeality of demons in the early modern imagination [Fig. 2].30
27
E. Harley Oxford and Oldys, W., The Harleian miscellany, 170.
28
E. Harley Oxford and Oldys, W., The Harleian miscellany, 171.
29
Sabine MacCormack, "Demons, Imagination, and the Incas," in Representations, no. 33
(1991): 123.
30
Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago; London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2.
 Chisamore 9

For the first time Saint Anthony’s Temptation by these hybrid-creatures was suspended in air,

extending the environmental phantasm referred to in earlier hagiographical accounts. It is not

only St. Anthony being lifted in air which is novel, but too the physical contact between human

and demon. Some artistic renditions are more explicit in the corporeal connection between

witches and demons [Fig. 3]. Hans Baldung Grien’s Witch and Dragon illustrates a witch

penetrating herself through the body of the demon. The work itself becomes serpentine in form

with twisting, connected figures reminiscent of an ouroboros. The body of the witch and its

connection to evil is not only visible in the sexual relations but is compounded by use of a literal

and figurative tongue. Here, we see artistic parallels to deposition records wherein examinants

are accused of copulating with the devil to secure covenant. The witch is characterized by

physical and moral failings which, as this image articulates, invert proper behaviours.

For those of early modernity, it was a demon’s transformative powers which remained

debated. This debate occurs even in the prelude of trial records in 1645 Essex: could a witch be

turned into a creature by the power of demons?31 This power appears concerning witches

themselves. In Munich of 1601, a witch was said to have suddenly taken the feet of an

administrative secretary prior to killing him with magic.32 On a perhaps comforting note for their

readers, Aquinas suggests otherwise: “In some manner they can transfer the forms [or

perceptions] stored in the sensory organs, so that [by means of] these [stored forms] certain

apparitions appear.”33 A case of Matthew Hopkins, prolific “Witch-finder Generall” in 1645

Manningtree (Essex) illustrates this same concern: “Devils cannot create any nature or

31
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, ii.
32
Anonymous, A strange report of sixe most notorious  vvitches  who by
their  diuelish practises murdred aboue  the number of  foure  hundred small children,
London: Printed by W[illiam] W[hite] for T. Pauier, 1601, Early English Books Online.
Accessed 15 November 2019, 3.
33
Stephens, Demon Lovers, 294-5.
 Chisamore 10

substance, but in juggling them show, or seemingly only, whereby false shadows covering those

things which are created of God to cause them to seem that which they are not indeed.”34 Thus

the primary concern is not what demons or Impes are capable but rather that they are present and

converting with devilish covenants the suspicious woman down the road. She in turn, with a

poisonous tongue, would convert others and spread the disease of witchcraft communally. Their

power was capable of corrupting the bodies of others through magical illusion and as records

suggest, death.

Referencing the role of gender in nation-making Joane Nagel states women are

“biological producers of collectivities [and] as reproducers of the [normative] boundaries of

ethnic/national groups [and] ideological reproduction”.35 Considering witchcraft as an anti-

institution within this binary network of good-evil or order-disorder, the productive role of

witches extends into the body politic. Through body and blood, the witch’s family and wider

community may be converted to bloody covenant. In many cases, a mother converts her daughter

to witchcraft.36 In others, her husband and rarer yet, her sons.37 Returning to Erasmus, the evil

tongue is certainly more dangerous than the genitals and equally as reproductive.

In the 1645 case of Thomas Evererd A. Cooper and his wife, Mary, their corruption had

communal reach: their Suffolk Brewhouse at Halfworth was said to be bewitched. “The

odiousness of the infectious stink of it was such so intolerable that by the poisonese of the scent

34
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, ii.
35
Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of
Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 252-3.
36
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 11-12, 14; Anonymous, A true relation of the araignment  of
thirty  witches at Chensford  [sic] in Essex, 1; Anonymous.
VVitches  apprehended,  examined  and executed, for notable villanies […] (London:
Imprinted by M.F., 1635), Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 November 2019, 5;
Margaret Flowers, Witchcrafts, strange and  wonderfull […] (London: Imprinted by M.F.,
1635), Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 November 2019, 17.
37
Anonymous, A strange report of  sixe  most notorious, 2-3.
 Chisamore 11

at taste many people died.”38 The pair confessed to covenant with the devil and were found to

have the teats from which Impes suckled. I quote: “Some of them had such teats or dugs under

their arms, some under their tongue, some in the roof of their mouth, some on the crown of the

head, some among the toes…”39 Of the records examined in this study, female witch marks were

consistently found on either their breasts or near the genitals. A pattern emerges of male witches

and married women possessing teats in less sexualized places (such as those of Thomas and

Mary) than their unmarried or widowed counterparts. Where absent, the devil is shown to take

the place of the male patriarchal figure. This further reveals the gendered body of the witch with

signifiers of their inverted characterization of woman and matriarchal figure.

It is in this vein witchcraft might further serve a literal reproductive role. Some women

were said to have used love magic in an attempt to gain a husband. In 1635 Rutland and Beaver

Castle Margaret Flower was brought into witchcraft by her mother, whereby she helped her

“That finding a glove about two or three years since, […] buried it in the yard and said a

mischief soul to it, and it promised to do her good and Cause Thomas Simpson to love her.”40

Ten years later in August, a Suffolk woman “confessed that they have had carnal copulation

with the Devil, one of which said that she (before her husband died) conceived twice by him, but

as soon as she was delivered of them they run away in most horrid and ugly shapes.”41 Likewise,

interrogated by Mathew Hopkins and John Sterne, Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree answered as

her familiars appeared in many animal-like forms: “What, do yee think I am afraid of my

children?”42 Women were capable of literally reproducing evil in the world as a mother inverted.

38
Anonymous. A true relation of the araignment  of  eighteene  vvitches […] in Suffolk
(London: Printed by I.H., 1645), Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 November 2019, 2.
39
Anonymous, A true relation of the  araignment of eighteene vvitches […] in Suffolk, 4.
40
Flowers, Witchcrafts, strange and  wonderfull, 16.
41
Anonymous, A true relation of the  araignment of eighteene vvitches […] in Suffolk, 5.
42
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 3-4.
 Chisamore 12

These imps were constructed as figurative and literal children send to spread evil in the world. It

is on the blood of these witches – the inverted milk of the mother – on whom they would sustain.

In the ten deposition records examined, and the seventy-sum individuals accused

contained within them, a total of over four hundred children were said to have died of

bewitching. In 1600 Munich (then, Manchen) alone, the trial of Anne Gamperle and her family

saw them accused of hundreds each.43 In later cases, the latest of these being 1649 at the end of

the English witch-panic, nearly all cases involved infanticide. With stricter regulation of

sufficient evidence, many involved a singular child who had taken ill, with numerous witnesses

and a notably longer trial process. This was in part due to the illegal status of torture in England

at this time.44 Judiciary processes required more than confession, and come mid-seventeenth

century, cases involve fewer accused, numerous community witnesses, and individual interaction

with those victims.

This same Suffolk deposition mentions 120 witches still awaited trial in Gaole.45 This

represents a drastic shift from executions following the day of arrest in records twenty forty to

fifty years prior. The consideration too, seems to be centred around making sense of parental

suffering and in its retribution, order. The Great Chain and social order were upset by witches.

As earlier cases discussed in this article have shown, many of these predominately unmarried

women were said to have not only copulated with but even married the Devil. Rather than

conforming to their (re)productive social designation of the period, they subvert it. To return to

Purkiss, in accusation these witches were not nurturing but rather destructive as an anti-

Household and an anti-Mother.46

43
Anonymous, A strange report of  sixe  most notorious, 1-3.
44
Stephens, Demon Lovers, 103-4.
45
Anonymous, A true relation of the araignment  of  eighteene  vvitches […] in Suffolk, 5.
46
Purkiss, “Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the Body, the
Child,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 180-1.
 Chisamore 13

The figure of a witch is a failed mother, either by lack of husband, children out of

wedlock, or corrupting her immediate family. The retributions for such failures were harsh,

particularly earlier in the century. Returning to Munich of 1600, Anne Gamperle was made to

suffer, not unlike the unmaking of a knight in the medieval period. Symbolic and corporeal, she

was brought before the town and placed between her two sons and “had both her Breasts cut off:

with which Breasts the executions struck her three times about the face: and in the manner of her

two sons, who fate on side of her were likewise beaten about the face with their mother’s Breasts

three times apiece.”47 This was the first of two further punishments inflicted. This staggering

violence was performative. Not only were her symbols of maternal nurturance publicly removed

but her sons were placed alongside, marked failures as children. On the surface, this might seem

a graphic warning for the watching public and indeed on one level it was. But this family was

accused of infanticide in the hundreds and Anne herself a hundred alone. The corruptive witch, a

failed woman in body and morals, was made to suffer so as to give order to the infant mortality

of the region. This was catharsis for those grieving mothers watching. As Roland Barthes writes

of wrestling in Mythologies: “What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of

Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. […] Suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction,

for everyone must only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he

suffers.”48

It is this failure and devilish subversion of motherhood we find in all cases. Pseudo-

physiognomic texts reprinted in early modernity established the inherent corruptive nature a

woman’s body alone (without demonic intervention). Commentator A in Albertus Magnus’

medieval guide to women’s bodies, De secretis mulierum notes its dangers:

Anonymous, A strange report of  sixe  most notorious, 8.

47

Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972):
48

19-20.
 Chisamore 14

Women are so full of venom in the time of their menstruation that they poison animals by
their glace; they infect children in the cradle; they spot the cleanest mirror; and whenever
men have sexual intercourse with them, they are made leprous and sometimes
cancerous.49

Women lacked the integral body to contain its sanguine humours, and it is this embodied failing

which informs those moral ones.50 This is only further compounded by intersections of the

domestic sphere and witchcraft. Diane Purkiss writes: “When this [domestic] process is disrupted

by witchcraft, the authority and identity of the housewife concerned are put in question. […]

Witchcraft characteristically produces an estranging and shaming effect or utter disorder, dirt and

pollution: milk behaves like white of egg, ale turns sour and smells vile, cows produce blood

instead of milk, and pease becomes stinking and uneatable.”51 Again, the witch is not only a

failure in controlling her gendered disposition but is further corruptive of the household and

those her neighbours.

Instead of milk for her child, a witch suckles imps with blood at her breast. Most cases in

this study contained evidentiary examinations revealing teats in the genital region, in addition to

the breasts. I suggest these connections align with the life-giving capacity of womanhood or

rather its anti-thesis, in addition to those sexualized associations qualifying satanic covenant.

Like Elizabeth Clarke and other examinants on whom marks were found, this intentional loss of

blood mimics the menstrual corruption of their sex. For a witch, bodily and moral failings work

in tandem to intentionally nuture evil in the world. Humoral theory understood milk as blood

adequately heated inside the body, referred to in De secretis as “better cooked and digested”.52

While women were characterized as cold/wet (compared to the hotness/dryness of male

counterparts), it is the witch whose body fails to produce even the heat adequate for breast milk.
49
Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 60.
50
Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), 91.
51
Purkiss, “Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the Body,
the Child,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 179.
52
Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 64.
 Chisamore 15

This same humoral framework aligned evil with coldness, as the Devil appeared “in the shape if

a little blacke dog [which] leaped into her lap,& kissed her three times, but she felt them very

cold.”53 This was reported further as the Devil copulating with the witch to secure covenant, in

many cases marrying the Examinant in an inversion of the sacrament.54 Here we find an English

household inverted through the corruptive body.

In many cases, older women were accused for attempting to subvert the role of a mother

herself. Witches would, as Purkiss again suggests, “they feed them, stroke them, take too much

interest in them, know too much about them.” Returning to the menstruating women tarnishing a

mirror, there is danger in the gaze. More importantly, it is their physical contact which is

essential. This might take the form of a touch or a piece of food. Margaret Moone, another 1645

Essex (Manningtree) resident offered a child an apple in exchange for labour; he quickly took

ill.55 Likewise Mary Johnson “took occasion of her own accord to commend the said Child,

saying it was a pretty child, and stroaked it upon the face, and gave it a peece of bread and

butter”.56 Here as in all cases, the child was said to have begun “shrieking and tearing itself” and

died shortly thereafter. Through touch the body of the witch becomes even further corruptive and

her words an affirmation of this guilt.

Concerning evidence, nearly all cases involved inspection of the body by older women

(perhaps in self-protection in light of this last example) designated as searchers. In line with the

increasing evidentiary requirements, a case from 1646 Huntington reads many cases “taken up

53
Anonymous, A true relation of the araignment  of thirty witches  at  Chensford [sic] in
Essex, before Iudge Coniers, fourteene  whereof  were hanged on Friday last, Iuly  25. 1645
(London: Printed by I.H., 1645), Early English Books Online. Accessed 15 November 2019: 2.
54
Anonymous, A true relation of the araignment  of thirty witches  at  Chensford [sic] in
Essex, 2.
55
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 22.
56
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 20.
 Chisamore 16

by heresay and report, which frequently prove untrue.”57 This required more evidence. In

Suffolk the year prior, this was also the case. Searchers would strip and search the witch for teats

and, anticipating the eventual arrival of an imp needing suck, would make them stand on a stool

for twenty-four hours under supervision.58 If anything, requirement of sufficient evidence

furthered the humiliation of those involved.

Many accusations emerged from local rivalry (revenge for reprimanding their child or

jealousy), or financial concern. Many victims were poor even by the standards of their

neighbourhood. In 1645, Elizabeth Clarke’s accuser, John Taylor, blamed his wife, Mary’s,

illness and its “unnatural” symptoms “because she said Mary refused to give the said Elizabeth

some Beergood.”59 Perhaps this emerges from intersections of impoverished and so jealous

individuals with broader social concerns of gendered behaviour. This corruption was regarded as

extending into community and beyond, whereby the body of the witch has the capacity to infect

family units, cattle, crops, and weather. Even reproduction was damaged on an environmental

level: cows suffering miscarriages and producing blood rather than milk. She does not feed

children but imps. She does not sustain livestock but infects it. Their very physical presence

seeps into, or intentionally influences, the land itself.

Just as in the Great Chain of Being, the local community is a microcosm of the larger

natural order. The political turmoil ensuing in the context of the English Civil War only

increased anxieties through which all order seems to be made chaos. Through this gendered

examination, the body of the witch – medically, theologically, and ideologically – bears the

corruptive power to transmit and sustain evil in the world. The witch subverted natural gendered
57
Anonymous. The witches  of Huntingdon, their  examinations  and confessions […] (London:
Printed by W. Wilson, for Richard Clutterbuck, 1646), Early English Books Online. Accessed
15 November 2019, i.
58
Anonymous, A true relation of the  araignment of eighteene vvitches […] in Suffolk, 6.
59
Anonymous, A true and exact relation of the  severall informations […] in the county of
Essex, 9.
 Chisamore 17

order and was understood to transmit this dangerous subversion into the public sphere. A

menstruating woman might corrupt with a glance but it is the flesh of a witch whereby the body

politic may be made ill.

Appendix 1
 Chisamore 18

Figure 1. Emblem of the “Evill Tongue” from George Wither, Collection of Emblemes (London,
1634).

Image sourced: Mazzio, Carla. "Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England." Modern
Language Studies 28, no. 3/4 (1998): 95.

Appendix 2
 Chisamore 19

Figure 2. Didacus Valades, The Great Chain of Being from in Rhetorica Christiana, 1579.
Illustration.
 Chisamore 20

Appendix 3

Figure 3. Martin Schongauer, Temptation of Saint Anthony, ca. 1480-1490. Engraving.

 Chisamore 21

Appendix 4

Figure 4. Hans Baldung Grien, Witch and Dragon, 1515. Pen on brown tinted paper. Staatliche
Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.
 Chisamore 22

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