Bewitching Gender History Available to Purchase

This chapter explores how the global history of witch hunts can be used to teach global gender history. A comparative study of witch hunts in geographically and temporally diverse settings allows students to investigate how witchcraft accusations were/are used as a state-sanctioned tool to enforce gender norms in the name of social order. By centering curricular materials from outside of early modern Europe, in fact, by privileging sources from the Global South, this chapter challenges the historical erasure of non-Western witch histories. Whether through the study of Muscovite serfs using their landlord's fear of being cursed to gain additional mobility or via the consideration of communal authority granted to women in colonial Guatemala due to their knowledge of the human body and healing arts, the chapter analyzes and articulates a nuanced understanding of global gender history.