ABSTRACT
The historical study of witchcraft was one of the first fields to accept gender history as part of the mainstream. Witchcraft historians became interested in gender very early, and gender struggle has been a part of various political interpretations of the history of witchcraft such as Mary Daly and Barbara Ehrenreich. Gendered concepts of magic in Europe can be approached from two angles: from the perspective of beliefs and from the perspective of practices. In towns, the model of social organization was the hierarchical trade guild or the workshop with its established division of labour. The gendered division of labour seems to have formed and changed quite gradually in early modern Europe. More comparative work is needed to understand the complexity of gendered assumptions around work and magic. The question of gender and ownership in witchcraft is connected to the differing legal systems in Europe.
