ABSTRACT
In 1662, Margaret Lister of Fife was indicted for the crime of witchcraft, which at that time in Scotland was legally equivalent to treason. In her indictment she was described as “a witch, a charmer and a “libber.” A “libber” is a female gelder, particularly, but not exclusively, of pigs. In seventeenth-century Scottish slang it also meant a caster of spells, a woman who forcibly exposes a boy's genitals, or a woman who cuts off someone's ears. Being a witch, in the seventeenth century as now, therefore, was a peculiarly female form of deviance, one which involved transgression not only against the state and against God but against the gender roles which governed daily life.
