Bodies Marked with the Devil's Name. Witchcraft Trials Women's Bodies as Sites of Male Social and Religious Control

This book investigates how witchcraft trials turned women's bodies into battlegrounds, tracing the ways in which accusations of magic, possession, and heresy were used to police female autonomy, sexuality, and knowledge. It examines early-modern Europe and colonial North America as overlapping spaces where religious doctrine, patriarchal law, and village fear converged on the figure of the "witch, " exposing how women's behavior, speech, and bodies became the primary evidence in trials that were less about supernatural belief than about social discipline. Drawing on inquisitorial records, trial transcripts, and sermons, the book reconstructs the mechanisms through which women's bodies were interrogated: invasive examinations for "witches' marks, " the policing of midwifery and herbal knowledge, the use of torture to elicit confessions, and the theatrical staging of public punishments designed to reinforce male authority in both church and household.
It also traces how women who were economically independent, verbally assertive, or sexually nonconforming were disproportionately targeted, showing how the witch label functioned as a sanction against any woman who seemed to threaten the boundaries of prescribed femininity.