Much of Lyndal Roper's The Witch in the Western Imagination has been published before. The essays range from broadly synthetic interpretations to case studies based heavily on the German archives that provided the foundation for much of Roper's earlier work. The result is an interesting collection, but not one that offers anything particularly new to scholars of early modern witchcraft.
Many of the articles grapple with key themes and interpretive models in gender studies and psychoanalysis, two areas in which Roper has published extensively. In her introduction, she argues for the importance of “fantasy” in early modern witchcraft, a theme she sees as uniting the articles collected here. By “fantasy,” she does not mean fiction or falseness, but rather the image of the witch, broadly defined. Image here encompasses visual representations, certainly, but it also includes psychological manifestations and the very process of interpreting the witch. As such, what drives Roper's study is “how individuals made sense of witchcraft, why the figure of the witch could arouse such intense emotion, and why she could be used in so many ways” (11).
To answer such questions, Roper begins with one of her previously published articles, analyzing the image of the witch and its evolution from fearful to ludicrous in baroque culture. She then provides the more precise case study of the Gorgon of Augsburg, a witchlike figure once treated as the city's protectress but transformed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a demonic figure. In the third chapter, Roper offers a brief analysis of the type of material that historians often ignore and that Roper excels at analyzing: the depiction of an old hag carved into an elaborate frame designed by Albrecht Dürer. Chapter 4 develops the intersection of witchcraft and the emotion of envy, describing how the depiction of witches and envy become almost interchangeable, as well as the psychological implications of such a connection for the witch trials. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, Roper returns to the detailed archival studies that underlay her earliest work on witchcraft: consideration of the role of village tensions in witchcraft accusations and interpretations, the attitudes toward and treatment of witches' children, and the psychological implications of demonic obsession.
Like Roper's other work, the essays in this book are tightly argued and founded on detailed studies of images, archival material, the latest scholarly studies, and various psychoanalytical theories. As in this other work, Roper can push her arguments to levels that some scholars may find disconcerting: the early modern Gorgon of Augsburg is compared to the nineteenth-century portrayals of Joan of Arc; images of old women seem to be automatically equated with witches; and the role of envy in witch trials becomes connected to an unresolved “oral phase” (114) on the part of some prosecutors and demonologists. In some cases, she blurs—for what seem to be rhetorical flourishes—the socioeconomic and gendered divisions that she elsewhere emphasizes so effectively. For example, while classical allusions to Medusa- or Circe-like figures might have resonated with theologians or humanistically trained early modern Europeans, the extent to which they contributed to a common link between witchcraft and envy is much less clear. The willingness to extend such arguments and ground her analyses in modern psychological and gender theories, as seen in earlier works such as Oedipus and the Devil (1994), has often distinguished Roper's work; this book is no exception.
In The Witch and the Western Imagination, fans of Lyndal Roper's work will find much to confirm their admiration. Those who may have questioned her reliance on psychology or hoped for a broader synthesis will likely be disappointed; but new readers interested in art, culture, and behavioral studies may find her use of imagery and emotion in the study of witchcraft quite compelling.
