Monstrosity, Sexuality, and Evil: Early Modern Witch 'Identity' in Spenser and Tasso
In romance epics of the sixteenth century, there appear many deceptively beautiful women whose role is to throw the male heroes off their heroic paths, a la Circe with Odysseus, or like the “siren,” the beautiful-woman-turned-vile-creature that appears to Dante in Purgatorio 19 on the terrace of sloth, who has been read as representing the sins of the flesh, temptation, that which Dante the pilgrim must resist in order to move upward. These women are, in the epics, most often referred to as “witches,” but they display varying degrees of “witch-ness” as defined by the different kinds of witch discourses that were circulating during the period. They also suggest a movement from an earlier model of witchcraft – based primarily on ritual or “folk” magic performed by a skilled practitioner in order to accomplish an evil or mischievous act, called maleficium – to a model where the witch was assumed to have a more thoroughly “evil nature,” revealed not only through her evil acts, but visible in her very embodiment and stemming from a denial of God and an eagerness to help Satan in his diabolical endeavors.
Although they hail from a very different period in witch discourse, these witches do, however, have many similarities to certain “monstrous” or mysterious and perhaps diabolical women that appear in texts from the middle ages, such as Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine and earlier Latin chronicles. In this paper, through readings of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Melusine, and other documents, I will draw attention to several things about early modern witches – both literary representations of witches and historical beliefs about them. First, I will cite examples of the complicated and intersectional relationship between literary representations of witches and the theological, “scientific,” and popular discourses about witches, witchcraft, and evil. I will then discuss the ways in which the witches in early modern literature (and the earlier monstrous women) partake in a discourse about deception, truth, and falsehood, explicit in the revelation of their monstrous form as their “true” form, as an invocation of the “truth” – evil – that can lurk behind any (female) disguise; I will also discuss the extent to which this idea of the “truth” of the beautiful woman being revealed as “witch” or as “evil” led to early modern witchcraft, as a discourse, producing the idea of what I would call “witch identity” (as opposed to simply the “evil acts” of maleficium), where the “truth” of one’s being was located, for women accused as witches, somewhere at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religious belief, and physical embodiment. I will also argue, drawing upon Eve Sedgwick’s theory about minoritizing and universalizing discourses, that this new “witch identity” produced a situation where, simultaneously, witches were a small, specific, easily identifiable marginalized group and a group with very permeable boundaries, into which any woman, at any moment, might be in danger of falling.
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