Women’s Care Work and Witchcraft Suspicion
A record in The Hawthorn Archive, preserving folklore with its place, type and source context attached.
Research using Richard Napier’s early seventeenth-century casebooks has examined how women’s work in childcare, sick care, household medicine and livestock management could place them close to moments of illness, infant death or unexplained animal loss.
Historian Philippa Carter has argued that these gendered working conditions could make witchcraft accusation an occupational hazard for some women. This is more precise than the modern myth that female herbal healers were systematically persecuted simply for possessing medical knowledge.
Source trail: University of Cambridge research on witchcraft accusations and women’s occupations using the Napier casebooks.
Related Journal record: Wise Women and Cunning Men.