Women, Religion and the Body in Early Modern Europe

Researcher: Dr Jacqueline Van Gent

This project investigates the question of how gender, religion and the body were interrelated in early modern Europe, with particular reference to the discourses of witchcraft and religious revival movements.

Magic affected male and female bodies and was committed by men and women during the early modern period. Yet the witchcraft records reveal in great detail how some forms of body magic, for example the wide-spread milk magic, were only attributed to women. We therefore need to ask how women and men differed in their uses of body magic, including the use of body fluids and body parts. What meanings were ascribed to the social aspects of female and male bodies in magic? Was male magic and female magic mutually exclusive and was the use of body magic more common for one sex than the other? And finally we need to ask whether these magical exchanges between bodies were transformed under the influence of the Enlightenment and the body borders redrawn during the eighteenth-century.

Yet witchcraft was not the only religious discourse in early modern Europe that relied on the interconnection between gender, body and power. Catholic and Protestant revival movements such as the Counter-Reformation or pietism also drew on the symbolic power of the body in very explicit ways. Public exorcism, faith healing and ecstatic visions were all regarded as bodily states that carried spiritual significance. Illness as spiritual experience was the main trope of German and Scandinavian pietism, and associated movements such as Moravian Brethren. Young women played a very prominent role in these revival movements and my research is particularly interested in the ways female independent religious practice and women’s spiritual authority was achieved through a discourse of body and power.

The next stage of this research project will be a study of the construction of gender, religion and the body in encounters between Europeans and their ‘Others’ in the newly found colonies and expanding mission enterprises during the early modern period.

Research Outcomes

Book
Van Gent, J. Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Leiden: Brill. 2008.

Grants
2001 Visiting Fellowship, Max-Planck Institute of History and Institute of Historical Anthropology, University of Erfurt (Germany)

2000 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Research Scholarship for the International Women’s University at Hanover, July-October 2000. Project Area Body.