ABSTRACT
The fact that the majority of those accused during the great witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were females has naturally attracted much attention from both historians of witchcraft and historians of women. Yet there are few really good studies of the ‘gendering’ of witchcraft, or satisfactory explanations of why it was overwhelmingly perceived as a female crime. One of the problems may lie in the form which the arguments have taken. It has been assumed that accusations of witchcraft against women were straightforward reflections of their prior marginaliza-tion. Attention has focused, accordingly, on how changes in the situation of particular categories of women made them socially anomalous, and thus more susceptible to charges of deviance.
