Malevolent Nurture

In Malevolent Nurture, Deborah Willis explores the dynamics of witchcraft accusation through legal documents, pamphlet literature, religious tracts, and the plays of...

Deborah Willis is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside

Very well and clearly written and thoroughly researched.

Kenneth P. Minkema:

Another issue insufficiently considered in the intersection of witch-hunting and gender is that women were more likely than men to be accusers. Literary historian Deborah Willis seeks to redress this oversight.... Willis is critical of studies that represent witch-hunts as 'all-male' and 'univocally misogynist'; she takes issue with the 'widely held feminist view that assigns the women accused of witchcraft the role of rebellious proto-feminists and the female accusers to that of patriarchal conformists'.... She examines the threat of the witch to order on several social levels: peasent, gentry, and aristocratic.