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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how witchcraft trials and histories of madness reframed women’s ecological knowledge as uncanny or abject. An ecofeminist lens reveals how such narratives suppressed female agency and gendered “nature” as threat.

Paper long abstract

Witchcraft trials and the history of madness represent two intertwined systems through which women’s engagements with nature were delegitimized and controlled. Both figures—the witch and the madwoman—were constructed at the border of the human and the non-human, embodying anxieties over porous boundaries: the uncanny neighbor who turns strange, and the abject body whose fluids, words, or gestures resist containment. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the unheimlich and Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, this paper explores how women’s ecological and embodied knowledge was reframed as either supernatural (witchcraft) or pathological (madness).

Trial records and medical case histories both functioned as narrative spaces where female voices were disqualified: the herbal healers' remedies became evidence of a demonic pact, while the women’s testimony of visions or bodily affliction was reinterpreted as delusion or hysteria. In both domains, women’s ties to the natural world—through fertility, reproduction, or wilderness—were marked as dangerous, excessive, or contaminating.

By examining witchcraft and madness together, I argue that the processes of accusation, trial, and diagnosis reveal a continuous cultural pattern: the transformation of women’s ecological agency into sites of horror, disorder, and exclusion. An ecofeminist re-reading of these marginalized narratives not only reclaims suppressed knowledge but also destabilizes nature as a gendered metaphor of irrationality and threat.