Irina Husti-Radulet (SAS) - 2025-26 Students
irina.hustiradulet@london.ac.uk

Female Agency and the Body in Early Modern English Witchcraft

I interrogate female agency in the context of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English witch hunts: what was at stake for the women who accused other women of witchcraft? Witchcraft’s extensibility into the material processes of childbirth, cooking and culturation disproportionately interacted with spheres of female influence. With women primarily responsible for the health and wellbeing of their households, identifying a witch as culprit crucially allowed action to replace passivity. Although witch-hunting was doubtlessly destructive for women, it also paradoxically gave them a sense of agency in the face of inexplicable adversity. Questioning longstanding narratives of female victimhood, I argue that women’s proactive involvement in the witch hunts – whether as witnesses, ‘witch-prickers’ (body searchers), or distributors of medical or counter-magical practices that circulated within female networks of knowledge – provides firm evidence for the myriad ways through which they exercised agency over malign or unpredictable forces in the universe.

Principal supervisor: Professor John Tresch