Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Analysis of early modern Europeans’ development into a capitalist society begins with the history of the anti-feudal struggle. As feudalism disintegrated in the early modern era, working people demanded better lives. Capitalism emerged as elites fought against their demands. An early “grassroots women’s movement opposed to the established order” blossomed out of this clash (22).

Serfdom dominated life in medieval Europe, serving as the dominant class relation. Furthermore, according to Marxist theory, feudal life provided conditions that were better for the proletariat than capitalism because serfs could “access the means of their reproduction” (23). Women’s lives were better in the Middle Ages than under capitalism, too. For example, overlords gave serfs strips of land that they lived on and farmed in exchange for their (forced) labor, and they had direct access to the common lands, including hay meadows, forests that could be foraged, and pastures for grazing. Women serfs had more freedom of movement and were less dependent on their male relations than women under capitalism, although they were still subordinate to men and subject to the authority of the estate’s lord. Gender divided labor but women’s work held value: “Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden” (25). This domestic labor, however, is unpaid and thus valueless in capitalist economies.

By the later Middle Ages, however, conditions shifted. Serfs resisted the lords’ power ushering in an era of manorial “class struggle” (26). Serfs refused to supply the weekly labor to which elites claimed they were entitled and resisted serving in feudal armies. They also balked at the duties and taxes the nobility extracted from them, like tallage, a duty that overlords imposed arbitrarily when they needed revenue.

Money usage (or commutation) resolved some of this conflict and halted serfdom. Yet this new money economy failed to better peasant economic conditions:

With this momentous development, serfdom practically ended, but, like many workers’ “victories” which only in part satisfy original demands, commutation too co-opted the goals of the struggle, functioning as a means of social division and contributing to the disintegration of the feudal village (28-29).

Social divisions grew as some workers now exploited other, lesser laborers. The peasantry was divided, and a body of impoverished beggars emerged who depended on charity for survival. The rise of money adversely affected women because the new economy denied them inheritance rights and land ownership. Simultaneously, however, rising urbanization offered late medieval women new employment opportunities, independence, and increased social activity. Women were prominent in the silk-making guilds of the late Middle Ages, for example. These changes may, in part, explain why women were active in late medieval heretical movements.

The proletariat was heavily involved in millenarianism and heresies during the late Middle Ages. Millenarianism, the belief that a future millennium will give rise to a new world as prophesized in the Bible, gave rise to sudden bouts of peasant rebellion, and sometimes even wars, encouraged by apocalyptic visionaries. Heretical movements provided an alternative social structure for the discontented that were, in contrast, structured and planned, making them proletariat sociopolitical movements grounded in alternative approaches to Christianity. These heretical groups “provided an alternative community structure that had an international dimension” and encouraged “a more autonomous life” for the proletariat (33). Moreover, heretics rivaled Europe’s most powerful feudal overlord, the Church, which controlled significant amounts of land throughout, and, like secular overloads, exploited peasant labor and services. Heretical movements were therefore resistance movements opposed to clerical corruption and Church abuse. This resistance is seen in the heretics’ frequent devotion to the ideal of apostolic poverty. Groups like the Cathars rejected orthodox Christianity’s materialism and corporeality. They eschewed wedlock, sex, eating meat or eggs, and consuming milk because of their belief that evil generated the material world. This perspective, however, does not mean the Cathars held negative views of women. Rather, because of the irrelevance of the material, women held important positions within Catharism, ministering and taking on clerical positions. Unmarried men and women lived together in some heretical communities while the orthodox Church condemned such behavior. Heretical rejection of the body and sexual activity acted as birth control and helps explain why the Church targeted these groups for extermination (while laws cracked down on “reproductive crimes” such as sodomy and infanticide) just as Europe’s population declined and a labor shortage arose.

Meanwhile, in Europe’s cities a “new type of serfdom” surfaced as powerful urban guilds (43), like that of the politically influential cloth merchants in Florence, excluded workers. Heretical movements thus attracted this suppressed urban proletariat, and laborers rebelled, as during the Ciompi (textile workers) revolt in Florence in 1379.

The Black Death marks an inflection point in European history because it caused significant depopulation. The social, political, and economic effects were profound:

Social hierarchies were turned upside down because of the levelling effects of the widespread morbidity. Familiarity with death also undermined social discipline […] However, the most important consequence of the plague was the intensification of the labor crisis generated by the class conflict; for the decimation of the work-force made labor extremely scarce, critically increased its cost, and stiffened people’s determination to break the shackles of feudal rule (44).

Workers now had the upper hand because they could demand better wages and lower rents while the cost of grain fell. Rent strikes proliferated, and resistance to feudal obligations became a trend throughout Europe: “The class relation, on which the feudal order was based, was subverted” (45). Elites attempted to “increase the exploitation of work” (45), which resulted in numerous peasant revolts across Europe.

The 15th century launched an elite “counter-revolution” that fomented division and cultivated misogyny, which in turn promoted witch-hunting. Europe’s nobility and bourgeoise united in their efforts against the proletariat, thus underpinning absolutism, as the state emerged as “manager of class relations” (49).