Humanities

"Abstract:

Diane Purkiss claims that “in Early Modern England, the witch was a woman’s fantasy and not simply a male nightmare”. Continuing along Purkiss’ notion of witchcraft as perpetuated by women, this article looks at the Idealized-Demonized Witch-Figure in Early Modern Europe, and how the two sides of the same figure served to empower women and threaten men. Elizabeth Grosz describes that the West constructs the woman’s body as ‘leaky’, ‘changing’ and ‘uncontrollable’; these very fears encircling the ‘seeping’ female body are evoked in debates fixed upon the danger and nature of witches and witchcraft. The purity of a mother’s body is juxtaposed with the Witch, whose breasts give not milk but blood, and the good housewife who is virtuously enclosed in the home is contrasted with the witch who flies to the Sabbath to engage in ritual orgies.

This figure of the demonic and anti-maternal woman appears within the seventeenth-century works of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and dramatists, showing that occult erudition was not limited to scholars like John Dee and Robert Fludd, but parts of it—often the most sexualized parts—would appear in popular culture."

"Abstract:

Heavily influenced by the earlier Neoplatonic and Hermetic works of Pico della Mirandola, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Marsilio Ficinio, John Dee constructed a practical form of angelic magic which allegedly allowed him to use spirits in order to spy for Elizabeth I and catalogue a host of “angels” using his infamous scryer, Edward Kelly. The appearance of one spirit, in particular, would recur throughout their occult experiments: Madimi, who would age throughout the process of scrying, and though she first appeared as a young girl, she later began to appear as a young woman.

Simon Forman—another Elizabethan astrologer-physician—would often employ herbs or talismans which connected to the supralunar spheres and planet-daemones using the hermetic properties of sympathies. In constructing his talismans, he would appropriate the sympathetic metals, colors, and stones in connection with a planet, or sphere, which was chosen because its particular power over a certain part of human anatomy. Lauren Kassell would write that “Simon Forman is infamous for his astrology, notorious for his magic and legendary for his sexual exploits”, and he would later appear in the works of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe. Alongside Forman's detailed daily astrological calculations, he would mark in detail with which women he had sex, and at what times—creating a connection between his occult practices and his sexual practices.

As the spirit Madimi grew older during her conversations with Dee, she became increasingly sexualized, until Dee became to question the legitimacy of his 'angelic' experiments. If John Dee had, in fact, been receiving advice from demons rather than angels, he would have been soliciting help using black magic, a practice all semi-respectable magicians were eager to avoid. Their magical practices become increasingly questionable when Kelly informs Dee that the “angels” have requested that the two men share everything between them, even their wives.

The connection between magic and sexuality as practised in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries becomes a concern for historians trying to construct a coherent philosophy surrounding early modern occult cosmologies and intentions. When magicians, who previously followed in the near gnostic and ascetic traditions of preceding occult philosophers, begin to slip into magic mixed with sex-rituals their status as natural, or divine, magician becomes questionable."

Abstract:


The issue of reading feminism within an early modern, or ‘pre-feminist’ era, becomes all the more problematic once—as teachers—we present those readings to the next generation of students, as the problem of teaching feminism in a literature with few or no female voices dissenting against contemporary hierarchies. However, the power structures that existed between men and women were always a cause of great anxiety, and questions of fundamental values and abilities were always an issue. When teachers position early modern literature as within the presumed-patriarchy and the modern student as a voyeur, looking back from a supremacy of presumed-liberation, the full subtleties of privilege—be those racial, class, gendered, or heteronormative privileges—are ignored for the sake of ease of period representation and the sense of false accomplishment that can accompany ‘looking back’.

In reality, the gender hierarchy was positioned within other types of hierarchy within the early modern world, in order to create a uniformed power structure. When examining the philosophy and politics of these orders within the early modern period, the student can see that dissent is everywhere, and when feminist struggles are seen within other modes of resistance the distinction between pre- and post-feminist revolution seems much less defined. This paper proposes to address these issues of feminist struggles and problems within feminist pedagogies, problems which place struggles in the past and position the student within the unmoving status as ‘post-revolutionary’. I will argue that struggle and revolution is always ongoing, and if we look back to the anti-hierarchal dissent in the past in a way that presents it as all encompassing against prevalent power structures and not just those gendered, then that allows students to see themselves as a part of that struggle and always striving to move forwards.

Abstract:

In her short essay, “Twisted Privileges” (2008), Frinde Maher writes about her experiences in teaching Women's Studies to a classroom of predominately white and middle class students, where the students are eager to embrace their positions as victims of patriarchy, but unwilling to address their positions of privilege in relation to their class.  This demonstrates the need for an intersectional feminism as outlined by Kimberle W. Crenshaw (1989) and later incorporated into Lena Wanggren's “Being a Feminist Academic” (2011), where patriarchy is addressed as only one mode of power and oppression and where class is brought into discussions of power so that the students are encouraged to confront their own privilege.  Teaching feminism in a place of privilege presents challenges when struggles of gender, class, and race are segmented into different theories of power, allowing people to place themselves within one structure of power struggles while neglecting to engage with more universal notions of privileges from other lines of power.  Moving on from Maher, Crenshaw, bell hooks and Kate McCoy's theories of a culturally conditioned identity, this paper argues that becoming a radical teacher of feminism means to be focused on concerns of the relationships that have developed and are continuously developing between personal privilege and oppression, and “thus fundamentally reworking the structural as well as representational terms of inclusion that feminist teaching promises” (Maher, pg. 5), allowing the student to address their place within the gender hierarchy, but also within each hierarchy that has grown from personal power and privilege.

Works Cited

Frinde Mahler. “Twisted Privileges: Terms of Inclusion in Feminist Teaching”. Radical Teacher. 83 (2008): 5-9.

Abstract:

This paper draws on my doctoral research, and will investigate the use of Lilith in the early modern world as an archetype through which to express anxieties surrounding sexuality, political power, and the feminine.  It will draw on sixteenth and seventeenth century sources—such as John Selden, Edward Kelley, John Dee, Ben Jonson, and John Milton—to examine the use of Lilith—both as witch and as demon—in various demonological, Cabalistic, and political works in an attempt to demonstrate how her implicit (and explicit) naming served as a point of departure for all things relating to witchcraft, the sexually exotic, and the Other.  It will also draw on the more recent scholarship of Diane Purkiss, Michael Biberman, and Elizabeth Grosz to investigate how these themes are interpreted by corporeal feminisms.  Focusing on John Selden's De Dis Syris (1617), I will outline early modern histories of the origin of Lilith, and her invocation as a figure of political inversion and as a threat, being the dark Other of current states of monarchy, and the feared danger to masculine power structures, arguing that the feminine demonic played an important role in debates on political divine right as a patriarchal force, the roles of women, and the illegitimacy of demonic magic and witchcraft.

Published as "Beauty, Eroticism, and Monstrosity in Early Modern Book Illustrations." Monsters and the Monstrous Journal. 3.2 (2013): 97-110.

Abstract:

Developing from my doctoral research, this paper will look at how anxieties surrounding the demonic and the feminine are connected in sixteenth and seventeenth century printed illustrations.  With developments in printing methods early modern readers increasingly demanded images to accompany texts, and often these illustrations focused on the monstrous, the exotic, and the erotic.  Edward Topsell's History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658) and Ulisse Androvandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642) are copiously illustrated bestiaries which focus on the sensual and the dangerous aspects of the monsters, often including evidence of witchcraft in the narrative, and  conflating issues of monstrosity with contemporary witchcraft fears.  This paper will look at instances such as these which express the mating of the monstrous and the witch in seventeenth century monster stories, and will explore the implications of this exoticised female and monstrous sexuality, and the attempts to catalogue, and therefore manage, it.

In 1610, Scottish traveler William Lithgow (1582-1645) journeyed from the British Isles across the European continent towards the Middle East.  In his “The Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations”, he recorded his experiences in Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Poland, Bulgaria, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and what he insists on calling Constantinople.  His fervent Protestant identity surfaces in his works as he relates his travels across Roman Catholic nations, and his Christianity informs much of his understanding of Islam.

This is a new project, which builds on my doctoral research on John Selden and the semiotic transition of near eastern philosophy and ideas into western Europe.  Selden's De Dis Syris (1617) – an early work of comparative religion – chronicled the transformation of near eastern gods and goddesses, philosophies, and theologies, through to their Greek and Roman counterparts, and drew parallels to Biblical figures and stories.  Though this work has been little studied, it is one of the earliest examples of a theory of Indo-European language and culture.  A century before William Jones (1746-1794) outlined his Indo-European language group, Selden was using etymological similarities between Semitic and European languages to place ancient middle eastern mythology and culture as an ancestor to classical and Biblical sources.  There has only been one English translation of this work, which was a partial translation in 1880.  Working from the original Latin, this paper will examine a growing awareness of a occidental debt to oriental ideas, looking at the linguistic focus in Selden's writing.  The project will then place the work within the context of contemporary early modern interest in the ancient and the early modern middle east, looking at English perceptions of Islam, and how that potentially influenced Christian identity.

I will investigate how English and Scottish explorers experienced eastern culture and Islam, and how this was influenced by their own relationship with Christianity and their identity as English, Scottish, or British, and where they understood similarities – rather than differences – between their faiths.

Katherine Bond Stockton notes that most 'progressive' academics would disagree with notions of trickle down economics, yet operate under similar notions of trickle down theory; in many sections of academia, there is a firm division between ideas and action.  And though Mary Gutierrez notes that “believing in equality doesn't automatically lead to an equal society”, many university educators hesitate to either bring their political views into the classroom or to engage in meaninful activism which would work to bring about social transformation. This paper addresses the disconnect between theory and action, and argues that it is the teacher's duty not only to teach alternative and radical philosophies in the classroom, but to carry those radical philosophies outside the institution and to participate in feminist and other forms of radical philosophy.
Though we strive to encourage our students to become better scholars and critical thinkers, we hesitate to use our role as teacher to introduce students to critical radical philosophies.  Does feminism and anarchism have a place in our classroom?  How can we bring theory and practice together in our pedagogical practice?  Can a non-hierarchical mode of teaching, involving reciprical dialogue help to transform not only students and the classroom, but also society? If this is possible, then Lena Wanggren asks, “As feminist academics, then, should not the classroom be one of our main focuses, a central space in which to practice feminist politics?”3 This paper plays with Harold Bloom's idea of “the anxiety of influence”, and argues that students are not the blank slate onto which the teacher imposes herself, creating the “teacher” within the “student”; but argues that trasformative education liberates the student from “receiving” knowledge, helping them to become active agents in their own learning and becoming. If as feminists or anarchists (or hopefully both) we dream of creating a world of personal autonomy and freedom, then that should be the very foundation of our role as teachers. If the personal is political, then so, I would argue is the professional.


STEPHANIE SPOTO recently completed a PhD in English Literature at Edinburgh University. Her research interests include queer sexualities, anarchism, early modern literature, feminism, and the occult.  This fall she is a Visiting International Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia.

Abstract:


Anxieties surrounding the demonic and female beauty are connected in sixteenth and seventeenth century printed illustrations.  With developments in printing methods early modern readers increasingly demanded images to accompany texts, and often these illustrations focused on the monstrous, the exotic, and the erotic.  Edward Topsell's History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658) and Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642) are copiously illustrated bestiaries which focus on the sensual and the dangerous aspects of the monsters, often including evidence of witchcraft in the narrative and conflating issues of monstrosity with contemporary witchcraft fears.  This article looks at instances such as these which express the mating of the monstrous and the beautiful witch in seventeenth century monster stories, and explores the implications of this exoticised female and monstrous sexuality, and the attempts to catalogue, and therefore manage, it.
Attention is given to the figure of Lilith, the mythical first wife of Adam, whose depictions in early modern illustrations represent her as simultaneously beautiful, monstrous, and dangerous. Her often half-human/half-animal appearance, coupled with her explicitly eroticized present in the images and accompanying texts, attests to the contemporary fears surrounding sensual pleasure, the female body, and the animalistic and monstrous nature of women's desire.

Keywords:

Lilith, Demons, Gender, Renaissance, Homosexuality, Erotic, Witch, Tarot, Deleuze, Bestiaries

With rising tuition costs across public universities in the U.S., an increasing number of young people are being deprived access to higher education. As homelessness and incarceration rates are rising with prison labor becomes privatized, there is a need for a radical shift in how communities both understand the roots of the problems and create solutions. In the U.S., the lengthening of incarceration rates and cuts to welfare programs have left more people excluded from college and university programs and the potential for transformative education that these programs might provide. In California, jails and prisons are so overcrowded that counties are "redistributing" prisoners, leaving them further cut off from their families and communities -meanwhile, the average prison sentences have increased 36% in just two decades.

Wittgenstein's theory of aspect perception has been taken up by scholars interested in
the ways that people take in and interpret visual stimuli. Within this field of inquiry,
Wittgenstein proposes the notion of 'aspect blindness,' the failure of a person to see a
particular aspect or expression. An important turn in the use of Wittgenstein's aspect
perception has not always been in the ways that deviating perspectives fail to "see" in
the same way that the normative category "sees", but in the ways that those on the
constructed margins turn a critical eye on the failure of normative "seeing". This paper
looks at the ways that the center recognizes its own failure to "see", examining the
work of scholars like Jonathan Havercroft, David Owen, and Bruce Krajewski who each
critique the racism and "aspect blindness" embedded in whiteness. It then turns to look at some of the histories of scientific racism within the Enlightenment to explore the background of the claims that white supremacy both creates racialized hierarchies
around grey areas existing between Human and Animal, and also creates supposed
transcendent categories of humankind which were then applied universally and used
as the justification for excluding some people from the category of humanity. The paper then returns to the work of Havercroft and Owen to look at their claims in light of this expanded framework, examining how these constructed categories participate in the construction of a racialized 'aspect blindess'.

In the seventies and eighties, feminist scholars critiquing Milton brought attention to the role of the woman reader, exploring the ways in which many women readers have experiences in reading Paradise Lost that differ significantly from men. The patriarchal backlash against these different perspectives demonstrates what is at stake when we examine Eve: the acknowledgement of women’s experiences and subjectivities. This chapter considers the work of feminist scholars Froula and Gilbert and the derisive responses to their work by Gallagher and Pechter, reworking this debate into twenty-first century queer studies of Milton’s epic. In this reading, rather than Eve existing merely as a symbol of patriarchal oppression in such a way that alienates women readers, Eve instead becomes a site of entry into a Milton that has become destabilized by the assertion of queer perspectives. Here, Eve is a figure of identification for the Othered and structurally marginalized readers, as they identify with her struggles for knowledge and independence.