ABSTRACT
Literary accounts of witches written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often stress the suspect’s ugliness. For instance, Gaule suggested that ‘every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voyce, or a scolding tongue’ was ‘pronounced for a witch’.1 Other authorities described them as ‘commonlie lame’, ‘foule’, ‘toothless’, ‘leane and deformed’, ‘of an horrid countenance’.2 Although there were occasional references to lame witches in Essex, the descriptions of actual trials lay no particular emphasis on the physical stereotype of the witch.3 Nor does Gifford’s description of Essex witchcraft suggest that people were selected as potential witches because of their looks. The impression from Essex evidence is that actions and personality, rather than physical factors, were the determining criteria. It may, however, have been true, as Ady suggested, that someone began to look like the stereotype of the witch when she acted like one.4 This sequence was reflected in the other physical characteristic of supposed witches, their mark. People were first suspected because they acted like witches; only later were they searched for some physical oddity, protuberance, or cavity, which would confirm or refute suspicions. Such a mark was usually in a secret place.5
