Edmonds, Radcliffe G., III

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies Faculty Research
and Scholarship Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies
2011
Review of Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and
Stereotype in the Ancient World, by Kimberly B.
Stratton
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Bryn Mawr College, redmonds@brynmawr.edu
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Custom Citation
Edmonds, Radcliffe G., III. Review of Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World, by Kimberly B. Stratton.
Women's History Review 20, no. 5 (2011): 846-848.
Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World.  
Kimberly B. Stratton, 2007 
New York: Columbia University Press, xviii + 312 pp., $45.00/£26.50. ISBN 978-0-231-13836-9 
 
  In her Naming the Witch, Kimberly Stratton provides a stimulating investigation of the 
ways that stereotypes of magic and those who use it vary in the ancient world, exploring how the 
social contexts in different historical periods affect the particular stereotypes that gain 
prominence in those eras.  This link between the representations of magic and their historical 
context makes Stratton’s study valuable to anyone interested in the social, intellectual, or 
religious history of the ancient world.  The study is well written and clearly structured, and 
Stratton makes a broad range of material accessible to readers who may not have the same depth 
of background in Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Jewish materials, although the choice of 
endnotes instead of footnotes does a disservice to the erudition buried in Stratton’s 
documentation. 
  Stratton considers the history of magic, ‘that particular constellation of ideas and 
Othering devices’ (p. xi), as a discourse in Foucault’s sense of a socially constructed and 
contested object of knowledge, examining the different ways it appears in the evidence from 
four different periods in the ancient world.  Starting in her first chapter (‘Barbarians, Magic, and 
Construction of the Other in Athens,’) with the Classical Athens of tragedy, Stratton moves in 
the next chapter (‘Mascula Libido: Women, Sex, and Magic in Roman Rhetoric and Ideology,’) to 
the poetry of Augustan Rome.  She then considers representations of magic in early Christian 
material from around the second century (‘My Miracle, Your Magic: Heresy, Authority, and Early 
Christianities,’) and finally the ideas of magic that can be gleaned from the Babylonian Talmud, 
finally put together from earlier traditions in the sixth century CE (‘Caution in the Kosher 
Kitchen: Magic, Identity, and Authority in Rabbinic Literature’).  These chapters are preceded by 
an introduction in which she surveys the scholarly disputes over magic and sets out her 
methodology, and a brief epilogue pulls together the major ideas of the work. 
  These theoretical end pieces are in some ways the most stimulating parts of the book, 
since Stratton neatly lays out her ideas for tackling some of the most difficult problems in the 
study of ancient magic, providing a good summary of the controversies that have vexed earlier 
scholars and showing how her approach to magic as a discourse of alterity can avoid or resolve 
many of the problems caused by essentialist definitions of magic. By examining the way different 
modes of alterity are emphasized in different historical contexts, Stratton can highlight how 
particular stereotypes are linked to the specific social concerns of the time and the strategies for 
constructing legitimate authority in those particular political contexts. 
  One of Stratton’s most interesting points is the difference in the ways in which female 
figures are used as Others in the different contexts.  She notes the prominence of young, 
vengeful female witch-figures in Greek tragedy in contrast to the old, lustful women in Roman 
poetry, pointing out that both these female types differ from the male, alien sorcerers of early 
Christian literature, who make women their victims.  She suggests that, while the Greek and 
Roman materials used women as a type providing a contrast to the norm of the male citizen 
subject, the early Christian writers, conceiving of themselves as Others in the Roman Empire, 
used the figures of women to represent themselves and their own vulnerable position in society.  
While much of the discourse in all the studies is focused on women and sexuality, the rabbinic 
sources draw a special connection between cooking and women’s activities because of the 
importance of dietary regulations in the establishment of rabbinic authority in these periods. 
  As valuable and thought provoking as her ideas are, Stratton’s particular studies in her 
chapters do not always live up to the potential of her proposed methods.  Stratton rightly draws 
attention to the links between the choice of type of alterity (age, alien status, gender) and the 
specific historical circumstances in which particular images of the witch were produced, but her 
account becomes at times overly schematic.  The different types of alterity coexist with one 
another as possibilities for accusations of magic in all of the historical periods she examines – 
male, foreign sorcerers show up in Greek and Roman literature; young, vengeful sorceresses 
appear in both pagan and Christian literature of the Roman era; and old hags abound from the 
earliest Greek sources to the Christian period.  The social and political circumstances she 
examines certainly play a role in determining which kinds of stereotypes predominate, but 
considerations of genre and even individual authorial preference also have their influence.  The 
particular attributes of any given witch figure depend first and foremost on the role the character 
plays in the literary narrative, from the divine foreigner Circe in Odysseus’ wanderings to the all-
too-human young, barbarian girl Medea in Ovid.  The literary imagination allows the figure of 
the witch to be shaped to fit the story, focusing on one type of alterity or heaping strangeness 
upon strangeness to create a terrifying figure.  
  These critiques, however, merely underscore the importance of Stratton’s fundamental 
point, that the specific representation of magic must be linked to the particular socio-political 
context.  While Stratton identifies some important trends in each of these periods, the context of 
each of her texts is richer and more complex than she portrays, and the representations of magic 
are dependent on more factors than she can examine in her study.  Stratton’s Naming the Witch 
should serve as a call for scholars to follow her lead in this kind of investigation of the particular 
contexts that shape the representations of magic and witches in the ancient world.   
 
RADCLIFFE EDMONDS 
Bryn Mawr College 
redmonds@brynmawr.edu 


Review of \u3ci\u3eNaming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World\u3c/i\u3e, by Kimberly B. Stratton

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&amp;context=classics_pubs

Review of \u3ci\u3eNaming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World\u3c/i\u3e, by Kimberly B. Stratton

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