Please join us on Wednesday, January 28 at 12 p.m. ET for the webinar “Revitalizing the Feminist Historiography of Witchcraft” hosted by the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft and the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The webinar is based on a forum (currently free to read on Project MUSE!) that appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. Forum authors Abigail Hill, Anne M. Little, Jonathan Durrant, Maryse Simon, Rochelle Rojas, and Vanessa Rodrigues Barcelos will join moderators Michael Ostling and Laurel Zwissler for a discussion about the forum.
In the introduction to the issue, Michael Ostling writes: “I have sometimes told my students that my job is to ‘make witchcraft boring again,’ to replace sensationalist narratives with the everyday realities of the ordinary early modern women condemned and killed as witches.”
Even as it debunks sensationalist feminist narratives, the forum maintains a feminist commitment to the witch trials as a gendered phenomenon, a symptom of men’s fear of women’s power and, therefore, as a backhanded acknowledgement of that power. We are asked to “conspire together to speak unspeakable things,” writes Laurel Zwissler. Join us on January 28 to continue the discussion.