ABSTRACT
In this project, my purpose was to describe and analyze trends in the literature (favoring literary evidence over social, cultural, anthropological, or historical studies), and that task occupies the bulk of the preceding pages. What we have seen is that, in Arthurian literature, male magical threats transform over the course of fi ve centuries into female magical threats. I identifi ed a few of the most salient social factors for the authors and representations of gendered magic considered-from feudal violence and economic disaster to nascent capitalism (and the resulting extreme gender anxiety)—but my discussion is by no means an exhaustive one, and the complex web of power structures which comprise societal relations cannot be explained adequately in as short a space as I have devoted to them. My analysis of Arthurian witches adds one more perspective to the evergrowing conversation about literary and cultural representations of magic. I have argued that while twelfth-and thirteenth-century writers utilized magic to construct a normative gender binary, emphasizing the threat of male violence, writers producing Arthurian narratives after the fourteenth century began to represent female magical power as threatening, a shift which resulted in the re-appropriation of the wicked witch-hag. Specifi - cally, the witch-hag assuages a profound cultural anxiety about the position of women within the shifting economic pressures of nascent capitalism (i.e., mercantilism) by stigmatizing and punishing (both symbolically and actually) women who do not conform to an idealized maternal norm.
