Lust and Letters: Witches and Their Pacts in the Early Modern Imagination

With Jasmin Mersmann, Freie Universität Berlin. 

In the popular imagination, witches were seen as individuals with supernatural powers who harmed others. Early modern theologians, however, increasingly defined sorcery as heresy and associated witches with the devil. Taking a series of paintings by the Flemish artist Frans Francken the Younger as a point of departure, this talk analyzes the motif of the devil’s pact, the power of script, and the scandal of literate women.

While many activities ascribed to witches—such as cooking, brewing, or handling brooms and hay forks—belonged to the sphere of rural women, reading and especially writing hardly did. Was such imagery an idiosyncratic fantasy, an echo of rising literacy, or a perverse reflection of the male fashion for learned magic? Francken allows viewers to see what no outsider could, drawing them into a game of attraction and repulsion, scopophilia and phobia, shared and esoteric codes.