Caliban and The Witch is Garbage History

“ As Mary Condren has pointed Out in Serpent and the Goddess (1989), a study of the penetration of Christianity into Celtic Ireland, the Church’s attempt to regulate sexual” behavior had a long history in Europe. From a very early period after Christianity became a state religion in the 4th century, the clergy recognized the power that sexual desire gave women over men, and persistently , tried to exorcise it by identifying holiness with avoidance of women and sex. ExpeliIng women from any moment of the liturgy and from the administration of the sacraments; trying to usurp women’s life-giving, magical powers by adopting a feminine dress; and making sexuality an object of shame “

By adopting a “feminine dress” do you mean normal 4th century Byzantine attire?  People wore fuckin’ robes.

Oh look 4th century Byzantine fashion

 “Can we say that this large female presence in the heretic sects was responsible for the heretics’ “sexual revolution”? Or should we assume that the call for “free love” was a male ploy designed to gain easy access to women’s sexual favors? “  

Here are some sources on why this is bullshit, 1. Because the female presence in most heretical sects was not particularly large and 2. Because “free love” was not a thing these sects preached.

Heresy and Gender in The Middle Ages  is comprehensive and useful

Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000-1200 By Heinrich Fichtenau points out that Bogomils and Cathars were sexually ascetic 

Women and Gender in Medieval Europe 

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe Chapter 31 refutes the idea that women were more likely to participate in heresys (their participation was in fact lower)

“ Significantly -in view of me future criminalization of such practices during the witch-hunt – contraceptives were referred to as “Sterility potions” or maleficia (Noonan 1965: 155-61) “

Her sources on contraception and abortion are from John T. Noonan a very very conservative Catholic judge (appointed initially by Regan) with no training in history whatsoever.  His book is revisionism by the modern church with little if any serious basis in history.

Here’s a better source

Also Oral Contraceptives and Early-Term Abortifacients during Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages is a good article

“recruits came from all walks of life: the peasantry, the lower ranks of the clergy (who identified with the poor and brought to their struggles the language of the Gospel), the town burghers, and even the lesser nobility. But popular heresy was primarily a lower class phenomenon. The environment in which it flourished was the rural and urban proletariat: peasants, cobblers, and doth workers “to whom it preached equality, fomenting their spirit of revolt with prophetic and apocalyptic predictions”

WRONG

Heresy was not a proletarian phenomenon 

Especially not the Cathars

Seriously not the Cathars

“ when they succeeded in establishing what (with some exaggeration, perhaps) has been called the first “dictatorship of the proletariat” known in history. Their goal, according to Peter Boissonnade, was “to raise journeymen against masters, wage earners against great entrepreneurs, peasants against lords and clergy. It was said that they had contemplated the extermination of the whole bourgeois class, with the exception of children of six and the same for the nobles” “ 

Also she references P. Boissonnade/P. Boissonade work “Life and Work In Medieval Europe” frequently, and I can find essentially no material on who Boissonade/Boissonnade (it’s spelled both ways in references to him) other than what he wrote.  His name may have been Peter, Pierre or Prosper and I HAVE NO IDEA WHICH AND FUCK THIS REFERENCE oh wait there’s a dead link about him on German Wikipedia.  OH WAIT IT MAY NOT EVEN BE A HE EVEN THOUGH SILVIA CALLS HIM PETER.  Prosper Marie Boissonade is… a French historian from the turn of the century and it is impossible to find anything very thorough on them.

“ On average, half of the town male youth, at some point, engaged in these assaults … / …   For proletarian women, so cavalierly sacrificed by masters and servants alike the price to be paid was inestimable.  Their reputation being destroyed, they would have to leave town or nun to prostitution ( ibid.; Ruggiero 1985: 99)”    

Here’s the sourced material, Ruggiero’s book doesn’t back up what she’s saying.  Also if half the town’s male youth was doing this… like… numerically I think that might not make sense.

For further reference on her nonsense arguments on witch hunts please see my post on Andrea Dworkin’s analysis of the same.

Also she does a lot of cherry picking from various areas of Europe to make her narrative look viable when it’s in fact… not.