Katharine Hodgkin

Contested pasts : the politics of memory

Introduction: Contested Pasts Transforming Pasts Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History Patterning the National Past And Then Silence

Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Gender occupies a paradoxical place in the historiography of witchcraft. The persecution of witches is not about gender alone, but it has a continuing, knotty and intractable relation to gender that comes in and out of focus in the historiography of witchcraft; the fact that the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft in most European countries were women is at once the most and the least visible feature of the persecution of witches. Popular perceptions of witch hunting focus above all on the burning of women, often associated with specific hostile male groups — doctors jealous of midwives, clerics driven mad by celibacy, or religious authorities aiming to obliterate ancient femalecentred religions. In the field of academic research, however, gender has often been overlooked, or treated as a side issue. Until quite recently it attracted relatively little attention.

Elizabeth Isham’s Everlasting Library: Memory and Self in Early Modern Autobiography

Memory, in early modern usage, is a fundamental quality of the person. Renaissance scholars inherited from medieval psychology the theory of the “inward wits,” memory, understanding, and imagination (memoria, cogitatio, phantasia).1 These three qualities constituted the human mind, establishing the self with its singular memories, intellects, and fancies; the loss of memory was thus in important ways a loss of the self. The phrase commonly used to describe someone as being of sound mind was “in perfect sense and memory”; to remember accurately was to grasp the underpinning narrative that held self together in time, and the loss of that narrative meant a collapse in self-awareness, to the point where a person no longer knew who they were.2 A memory text can thus be seen as a primary assertion of selfhood; not, as was once thought, an expression of “Renaissance individualism,” but a manifestation of a self-reflective, communicative subjectivity. Nor was this only an intellectual model of the self. In spiritual terms, forgetfulness was repeatedly invoked as not merely a temporary mishap but a basic flaw, a loss of righteousness: the injunction to remember was reiterated from the Old Testament on, in a stream of devotional texts recommending the godly to remember and reflect on instances of God’s providence in their lives and elsewhere.3 Memory was a means to spiritual growth; spiritual writing was saturated with the language of memory and forgetting.4