Elizabethan Witch Research Paper

Witchcraft historian James Sharpe talks of “the sense of otherness implicit in witchcraft; the sense of danger; and the sense that somehow ‘power’ is involved” (2). The witch is the other to not just the ‘good’ women in society but also to power yielding men. She is the mirror to which both these groups can be analyzed. She is the mirror reversal to the good woman according to society and a figure established by men to consolidate their power by showing what happens when power is held by women. Historians Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have asserted that the scold, the whore, and the witch were three of the most dangerous women as a result of specific societal fears: “the scold, of the power of women's tongues; the whore, of unbridled sexuality, the witch, a mirror reversal of all
Parallels between the representations of witches and unruly women have existed since the Elizabethan era in popular culture and literature. Witchcraft was classified as a pact with the devil as far as learned writers were concerned but popular audiences conceived of it as malfeasance, or the witch's capacity to do harm or destruction through occult means. Though witchcraft was tried and punished differently from other crimes, the process through which a witch might be singled out and accused shows that other deviant forms of social behavior were related in the popular consciousness. (Williams 2-3)
Sharpe has also noted that London's presses were producing popular literature on witchcraft usually with a ‘heavy moral undertone’ which reaffirmed contemporary religious beliefs. In Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, one character declares “What young man can we wish, to pleasure us/But we enjoy him in an incubus?” (1.2.30-1). Since one of the primary concerns about witches was the lustful nature of women the earlier works took those fears a step further, into actual sex with the