![]() ![]() ![]() In the name of Halloween, Witch Day, and spooking the pants off the patriarchy, let us now look at some of literature’s most significant witches. And while there is a broad spectrum of witch stories out there, there is a through-line common to them all: witches are women whose embodiment of femininity in some way transgresses society’s accepted boundaries-they are too old, too powerful, too sexually aggressive, too vain, too undesirable. Written accounts of women who practice magic are as old as recorded history, and continue to the present day (to this very week), with two much buzzed-about books: Alex Mar’s Witches of America and Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1962. ![]() While the word “witch” has its etymological roots ( wicce) in Old English, the concept has antecedents much older and geographically widespread. As far as popular fascinations go, few have endured for as long, or created as robust a bibliography, as witches. ![]()
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