Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews

Download or read book Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews written by Sigrid Brauner and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brauner shows that the modern notion of the witch as a willful, conniving, promiscuous woman was first established by German Inquisitors in the Malleus maleficarum (1487). In subsequent works by Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century playwrights Paul Rebhun and Hans Sachs, the witch emerged as the counterpart to the new feminine ideal of the urban housewife. By demonstrating how the binary concepts of "good" housewife and "bad wife" (or witch) were propagated among the educated urban elite who presided over witch trials, Brauner suggests that the witch hunts functioned to discipline women who failed to display the docility and subservience expected of the new urban housewife.