Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Women in Religion
Frightening Figures: Sacrilegious Women and Dancing Witches

Frightening Figures: Sacrilegious Women and Dancing Witches

Last updated on: October 18, 2022 at 4:03 am by Beth Allison Barr

Frightening Figures: Sacrilegious Women and Dancing Witches 2022-10-17T22:52:29-04:00 Beth Allison Barr

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Today I am so pleased to welcome back to Lynneth Miller Renberg to the Anxious Bench. Lynneth is an assistant professor of history at Anderson University, with teaching and research interests in gender, dance, emotion, and lay religion. Her monograph, Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith was awarded the Founders’ Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and is forthcoming with the Boydell Press in November 2022. She is also editor of The Cursed Carolers in Context.

If you venture into any store right now, the pumpkins, skeletons, and broomsticks make one thing clear: for a large portion of the population, it’s spooky season. As the season and the leaves are changing, popular culture leans into all things weird, ghostly, and a little bit fantastic.

The history of witches and wizards: giving a true account of all their tryals in England, Scotland, Swedeland, France, and New England; with their confession and condemnation / Collected from Bishop Hall, Bishop Morton, Sir Matthew Hale, etc. By W.P. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

Witches are just one element of this cultural obsession with the otherworldly and frightening, although our modern culture’s fascination with witches looks far different from the early modern fixation on them. Early modern individuals would have found spooky season to be bewildering and alarming rather than amusing, for early modern individuals viewed the figure of the witch as a threat to their wellbeing and responded aggressively. In England, between the 1540s and 1760s, a series of witchcraft accusations and trials led to the deaths of as many as 1,000 women and men, a trend replicated across early modern Europe and in colonial America. Early modern men found witches, particularly female witches, to be threatening. These women were dangers to be contained and eliminated before they destroyed godly men and women. While the presence of numerous witch costumes and decorations indicates that the majority of today’s American public does not share this perspective on witches, some of the traits and actions associate with witches remain the same: broomsticks, black cats, and, notably, dancing.

However, witches were not always associated with dancing, nor were they always quite so spooky.

In fact, medieval witches, at least in some sermon tales, resembled the friendly modern witches that populate October stores and films, bearing little resemblance to early modern witchcraft trials or executions. Sometimes these medieval witches even helped teach medieval laity about faith. One medieval English sermon tale from Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synnetells of a witch who had a magical bag that flew about and milked cows for her. The bishop of the town had her brought before him to demonstrate this magical flying bag, and then had her teach him the charm she spoke to make it fly. Yet, the bishop was not able to make the bag move: despite repeating the words exactly as she said them, nothing happened.

Why?

According to the witch at the center of the tale, it is because the bishop lacks faith, and faith matters more than words. The sermon then uses this principle– that faith is of primary importance, and that without belief, words mean nothing– to explain to its medieval audiences that they cannot just repeat the creeds but must believe them and let that belief drive their actions. As odd as the tale seems to us, to its medieval English audiences, the tale taught about true faith: not just speaking words but believing what you say. A woman– a witch, no less– demonstrated for medieval laity what true faith looked like and voiced the moral of the exemplum. And conspicuously, this witch fits none of the stereotypes associated with early modern witches: she has no cat or broomstick, and she does not dance.

When did witches start to dance, at least according to early modern authors, and what made that specific action so unnerving?

In part of my new book, Women, Dance, and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640, I explore when and how witches started to become associated with dance. I also explain how dancing, especially when performed by women, was perhaps even scarier to late medieval and early modern clerics than witches, at least initially.

And in fact, the fears about sacrilegious women in medieval parishes helped shape the stereotype of the witch as a dancing woman who did not fear God.

One sermon tale from the thirteenth-century Liber Exemplorum, another sermon collection, talked about women who “according to the evil custom of the country, wanted to perform their lewd dances,” and made a straw man with which to dance lustfully. As they called out to the doll, asking it to sing with them, “the devil, who had power over the wretched women, replied in a fearsome voice, saying ‘I shall sing.’ And immediately he shouted – not the doll, that is, but the devil within it – and gave forth such a dread noise that several of the women felldown dead.”

As medieval clerics built connections between dancers and devils and between sacrilege and women, these ideas melded into a single stereotypical figure: the dancing woman, rejecting God and in league with the devil.

And, as this 1627 sermon by Isaac Bargrave makes clear, this sin of relationship with the devil was idolatry and sacrilege: “disobedience to God and his Deputes, though it proceed from weakenesse, is a sinne. But if it swell to stubbornnesse and rebellion, it is a great sinne; great as Idolatry, which is the worst kinde of sinne; great as Witch- craft (which in blessed King Iames his phrase) is the worst kinde of Idolatry.” According to these and many other sermon authors, the sins associated with dancing – rebellion, sacrilege, idolatry – are also the sins of witchcraft.

When these sermons were placed alongside the new ideas about witchcraft developed in texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, dancing women who rejected God suddenly became threats not just to themselves and the church, but to their neighbors as well. And oftentimes, fights over dancing led into accusations of witchcraft, as parish leaders and laity fought over what it looked like to live a holy life.

For example, the case of Margaret Wiseman in 1592 in Essex, grew out of the frustration of a small group within the port borough of Maldon with the ardent reformers and Puritans within their community. In Maldon, home of noted Puritan author George Gifford (c. 1548–1600), accusations of magic against Wiseman and against Edmund Hunt (a leading figure of the anti-Puritan faction in Maldon) seem to have acted as outgrowths of bitter parish conflicts over traditional parish festivities. Theological assumptions about sacrilege and holiness, as my book shows, were weaponized not just against the women and men accused of witchcraft, but against the women of the parish as well.

Maybe the women dancing in your village were not witches, but surely these women could not be godly, if other women who danced often rejected God. And if these women were not godly, they needed to be monitored, confined, and ultimately made to be silent and still, lest their words and dances lead others away from holiness.

As my book shows, clerics increasingly defined both dance and witchcraft as sins because they were targeted actions of disrespect towards God that aligned the participants with the devil. As sermons and parish discipline focused more and more on dance as a problem because of its connections to sacrilege and witchcraft, the rhetoric used about women– the figures assumed to be prone to both actions– became more and more intense.

Most parishes would not have a witch hunt or witch trials, but almost all parishes would have dancers, assumed to be women and dangerous to holiness. Despite our modern assumptions, for medieval audiences, perhaps the most alarming figure of all was that of the dancing woman rather than the witch.

And if dancing women were the truly frightening figures, spooky season might last all year long.

Women in Religion

Beth Allison Barr

Gender

Guest Post

medieval Christianity

Previous Post

October 17, 2022

Evangélico Coloniality and the Continuing Politics of Translation

Next Post

October 19, 2022 Ron Sider and the Chicago Declaration

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe Guest Post guest post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What city was Job from?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Edom Shiloh Uz Susa