The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe

Occult topics have long fascinated artists, and the subject of witches—their imagined bodies and fantastic rituals—was a popular one for painters and printmakers in early modern Europe. Focusing on several artists in depth, Linda C. Hults probes the historical and theoretical contexts of their work to examine the ways witches were depicted and the motivations for those depictions.

While studying the work of such artists as Dürer, Baldung, Jacques de Gheyn II, and Goya, Hults discerns pattern...