By
Jose Ceja
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Witch art was a way to express female nudity during time period, UPenn prof says
Images of witches as broom-riding disciples of Satan are directly related to how they were visually depicted up to 600 years ago, a University of Pennsylvania historian said in a speech at the UA on Wednesday.
Since the 1930s, Hollywood and Halloween have created a witch figure that stems from this period, said Edward Peters, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Witches never had anything to do with Halloween until the American advertising industry decided that they should," he said.
The talk was sponsored by the University of Arizona Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Committee, the College of Humanities and the history department. About 300 students attended the speech.
It was entitled "The Fall Of Hermogenes: Sorcery, Witchcraft and the Visual Arts 1400-1800" and featured more than 90 slides tracing the visual history of witchcraft in Europe, how its depiction evolved and how it affected perceptions of witches.
"When we think of witches, we first think of visual images and then we think of the literature and the records and the trials," Peters said.
Peters said that visual depiction of witches almost exclusively depict women and this is reflected in the way most people think of witches.
"Proportionately (there were) far more women in the pictures than in the actual trial records and that may tell us something about how our ideas of witches and gender came about," he said.
Peters said the trials began in Europe in about 1430 and were depicted by artists in manuscripts from the early 15th century to cartoonists in the end of the 18th century.
These artists had different motives for depicting witches, Peters said.
Many took advantage of the artistic freedom that the subject provided to depict female nudity during a time of censorship.
Some of the art produced during this period closely resembled pornography, he said.
"This was a wonderful opportunity for erotica in a time when there hadn't been many opportunities," he said.
Many of these pictures, however, depicted people's real concerns, Peters said.
Some of the pictures depicted "weather magic" - tampering with the weather - which taken very seriously and was a common offense, Peters said.
Bradley Mayhew, a Greek language senior, said he was impressed by the amount of primary evidence Peters displayed.
Mayhew said he is interested in learning more about the medieval period and that is what drew him to the lecture.
"People thought in a way I can't connect with right now, I really can't understand it," he said. "It was a totally different mentality."
