TP's Witches
Some notes on STP’s portrayal of Witches
* The witch-midwife.
Researching the history of witchcraft shows a major inconsistency between the historical records and Terry Pratchett’s ideas. The historian in this BBC History Extra podcast confirms witch activity being defined as maleficorum. Only that. (https://podcastaddict.com/episode/140412687)
It's obvious there's a contradiction, but I didn’t have the info to put my finger on why until I heard this podcast recently. (note - It seems we’re in good company, even the entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica had the wrong info.)
I recently discovered that the research behind Terry Pratchett’s midwife-witches was flawed.
He’d got the idea from the writer Lovecraft who he was parodying. Lovecraft had picked up on the ideas of a writer and a biologist, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English. It seems that not being historians they made a natural mix up by not having read the original documents, only later opinions.
They were absolutely correct on both of their main ideas -
* one that witchcraft accusations had been a way of policing and repressing women’s behaviour in the past, and
* two that midwives were eventually pushed out of medicine by so-called ‘real’ doctors.
* Their mistake was lumping the two groups together.
Midwives were pushed out by doctors but weren’t persecuted with the witches.
Witches, and many innocent women along the way, were persecuted but wouldn’t have been recognised as professional midwives. They did have an important role in society and witchcraft was one of the few ways a woman could make an independent living. They were who you went to if you wanted to know about your future and probably gave advice along the way. You went to them if you had a grudge and wanted to get back at the person you were blaming with a curse. Some did useful herbalist and faith healer work too.
Historians have checked the records and found that while midwives occasionally appear among the lists of people accused or executed for witchcraft, it was no more than any other profession or position in society. Also the church wouldn’t have mixed the two up as midwives get a good rap in the bible but witches don’t.
I still love the witches characters but have to do a bit more gymnastics in my head now when he mixes up the witch, midwife and traditional healer roles. I know this is fantasy, and Discworld at that, but he’s so thorough in other historical details about traditional sheep rearing, relationships between the Lord of the Manor and the village, or describing how Granny made her hat with willow sticks it disappoints me a little that he’d been misled.
This “ Dig'' podcast has the details and all the references in the show notes in the link. It’s proper studies not opinion.
https://digpodcast.org/2020/09/06/doctor-healer-midwife-witch-how-the-the-womens-health-movement-created-the-myth-of-the-midwife-witch/
I had a look in my study bible too. I can’t see any way that even the most zealous, bigoted and misogynistic so called christians could have mixed up the two.
It has a very positive view of midwives in part due to the Egyptian midwives in the story of Moses in Exodus 1, and at the birth of Jacob in Genesis. Absolutely no link made with witchcraft in any way.
Whereas “witchcraft” has no healing or service connotations. It is clearly linked with idolatry, child sacrifice, divination, omens etc . “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft,” Deuteronomy 18 : 10,
Clarified by “How can there be peace,” Jehu replied, “as long as all the idolatry and witchcraft of your mother Jezebel abound?” 1 Kings 9,
Even in the NT, it’s paired up with “ … idolatry and witchcraft;... ” Galatians 5, 20 also translated as sorcery, or as The Message translation has it as “19-21 … trinket gods; magic-show religion; …”
The difference is clear. I don’t think likely there could have been any serious conflation of the 2 things, neither when there was little literacy, as the stories of Jacob, Moses and Jezebel have always been well known, let alone at a time when the witch trials started and there had already been several translations into English, including the King James Version, seriously, tragically flawed but clear in this area - he had his own axe to grind of course.
See also https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/13041/Robinson%2C%20Rebecca%20MA%20thesis.pdf
REWRITING THE WITCH IN TERRY PRATCHETT’S DISCWORLD
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts in English
at the University of Canterbury
Rebecca Anne Forbes Robinson
* Cottage.
Sign of patriarchy wanting to tie women to home life? Possibly, but I wonder if it is more likely a sign of autonomy for women. Tendency to burn down a suspected witch’s cottage so no other woman can think of going independent. Inheritance problems as her relatives might want it and not be pleased she wants to give it to another woman. Controversy. So the cottage could be very valuable symbolically. I wonder if the poor upkeep of the cottages was a sign of poverty and a lack of males willing to perpetuate female autonomy so refusing to mend it, or if they deliberately kept in poor upkeep to avoid covetous looks from others willing to take it by force. When the local landowner is also a dominant part of the local judiciary the law may or may not be impartial…
Ownership and inheritance of land and property tending to be principally male can be partly (but only partly) justified when it comes to agricultural land. In a nearby village there was a controversy recently. A woman had inherited a part of her father’s grape farm estate equally with her brothers who then farmed it all. She announced she was going to marry a man whose farm was further away, adding her parcel (for free as it were) to his already adequate farm, which becomes a patchy farm with a big gap in it. The brothers are left with ⅔ of a farm, not enough to make a sufficient living. I think the situation was not helped by the fact that the new husband was not just a rival but also part of an old family feud. She’s refusing to sell her part to the brothers too. *sigh* unclear rights and wrongs.
* Spinning
along with knitting, sewing etc could be seen as symbolic subjugation, tying women to the home but I suspect it was also a pragmatic part of a historic and highly skilled division of labour, necessary in a pre-industrialised economy. In their so-called spare time men would be expected to keep their hands busy too, notably whittling wooden spoons, pegs, maintenance of tools, knives, leather work, weaving, etc. We think of men as the farmers, but without tractors they would struggle to do everything and in practice women and children do a huge amount of weeding, harvesting and minding livestock. TP gets much more detailed with the Tiffany books. She does milking, churning and cheesemaking. The industrialisation of milk produce removed a lot of women’s ability to earn independently and their opportunity to meet people selling it at market. Ditto needlework, laundry and all the handcrafts. Although the counter argument is valid that it’s heavy drudgery to have to do all of it yourself and by hand. Mind you these things have made out of the house employment for women, in the ages before factories, as maids, dairy maids, seamstresses, kitchen maids, parlour maids and all the rest. The debate about what actually consists of women’s empowerment in rural communities is a great deep academic rabbit hole to go down if you’re so inclined.
As a curious insight on the issue, a friend went to visit a pastor in the heart of the jungle in Nigeria, Africa. His church had a big problem in that if any woman wanted to join his church without the menfolk of the family being a prior member she was liable to be thrown out of her home, but there was no way she could live independently, just no employment for women at all except as a prostitute or a witch - the divination, curses sort. He wanted non-electric powered sewing machines so that the abandoned women who were living in the church premises could make some money for themselves. Healing, midwifery and so on were part of what the village women would routinely do for each other and couldn’t be a source of income. Anything more requires a long trip to the nearest town to find someone with education that isn’t available in remote village communities like Lancre.
* Clothing.
Wearing black. Basically, most effective chemical dyes are pretty recent. Before that black and white were among the harder ones to do so were generally saved for the well off or high status individuals. Bleaching i.e. whitish, is pretty ancient and could be done using the ammonia of old urine, often combined with sunlight (ever sat on the bleachers at cricket ? old word for the planks where fabric was laid out, otherwise it was hung up in fields on tenter-hooks) In the Tiffany books the old baron has a memory of a wool jacket (maybe tweed?) that smells of wee, the fulling process of turning the woven fabric into dense felt meant treading it in urine.
Black. Using things like walnut husks (those who did the tedious and poorly paid job of harvesting them got stained hands and were known as the nutters) or mixes of blues and reds made what we’d now call faded blacks. However even these grey/browny blacks weren’t cheap. Deep elegant black came much more recently, the 14th C, with the importing of oak galls grown in Poland and the use of different mordants to fix the colour. Extremely expensive, it was adopted by royalty etc but that released the poorer black for those who wanted black status but couldn’t afford the new-fangled stuff. TP mentions the difference in one of his books when describing the difference between the Assassins who wore fancy black and the duller and very washed look of the witches. We’ve long had double standards about black, associating it with authority figures but also with evil.
Tiffany’s green dress might have been a bit unlikely in mediaeval times depending how late of course. There were no reliable green dyes till someone discovered you could dye a fabric blue with woad then over the top with a yellow. You could do green with all sorts of plants but it just wouldn’t be serviceable. Maybe his Discworld was more advanced than our globe.
STP had clearly done some domestic history research. There are mentions of Granny W. having a conical frame in her cottage that she used to make her own hats using willow sticks with canvas stretched over amongst other details.
* Origins of Maiden, Mother, Crone.
Mentioned in Greek mythology. Also longstanding Middle Eastern and European categorisation of women by their legal status, i.e. who is officially responsible for their upkeep. As far as I can tell this is a strong feature of cultures where survival depends on agriculture which is based on land ownership or where there's a strong division of labour along gender lines especially for skilled tasks which are best learned from childhood. It can be awful and a source of semi slave labour in the household, worse when the new wife has to move in with her husband's family, or a theoretical safety net society feature to make sure that women who couldn't work outside the home were provided for.
Maiden, Pre marriage, under the auspices of the father or in his absence, other senior family members. Mother who legally has to be provided for by a husband. Even as far back as the bible it was a legal obligation to provide food, clothing and 'comfort' to all wives even if they came from a slave background and the lack could be grounds for divorce in a culture inclined to apply this. By the same traditions the Crone ie widow, was the responsibility of family in the first instance and the tithing form of taxes to temple or church. It's obvious from some ancient stories that this wasn't always adhered to. One of the first actions of the brand new christian group was to appoint 7 reliable men for the widows feeding programme. It seems that in first century Jerusalem older women were left to starve.
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