Description
A tile with a print of a woodcut of witches conjuring a shower of rain, 1489.
The illustration is from Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. This book was a key intellectual milestone for me. I have a photocopy of this image hanging in the kiln room, which makes me think of power of women and how it is constantly being renegotiated, how wealth and prosperity of societies is dependant on women’s access to economic and reproductive freedom.
Federici: “If we consider the historical context in which the witch hunt occurred, the gender and class of the accused, and the effects of persecution,” then the inevitable conclusion is that it was an attack on “women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal.”
