Conclusion

Abstract

The process of identifying the witch brought questions about emotions, gender, and selfhood to the fore. As witchcraft was a crime largely without evidence, legal and religious authorities had to employ their expertise in their attempts to uncover the truth about a person. The trial process reveals the overlapping and at times contradictory individual, communal, legal, and religious understandings of not only witchcraft, but more fundamental categories of sin, morality, free will, guilt, and innocence. The trial process further reveals how individual and communal narratives took on, and themselves shaped, understandings of witchcraft, gender, and emotions in popular media, visual culture, and intellectual treatises. The way in which people attempted to make sense of themselves and each other, how the body and emotions were ‘read’, and how this was gendered, was thus at the very heart of the struggle to identify the witch.