Goddesses, dreamers, and witches: the politics of women in The Wild Hunt

Abstract

The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif with variants including a group of beings traveling through the night air with a central figure leading them. When we consider the motif of those who were involved in, and specifically those who led the Wild Hunt, a gendered difference becomes more evident during the Late Middle Ages. Existing studies tend to ignore the gendered context and the myriad ways women's existence is objectified, instrumentalized, marginalized, and erased in the motif. This leaves us not understanding why the motif was popular in early penitentials and the political, economic, and cultural reasons why the motif shifted in the particular way it did. This paper examines how European leaders used this motif to divide men and women of the lower classes and ensure the expropriation of women's agency for the benefit of protocapitalist accumulation of labor. I will situate women within European culture throughout the Middle Ages by looking at legal documents, church records, and literature about women and discuss those presentations through an intersectional feminist lens to explore the political cause and function of the gendered difference. When examined at the macro level, a pattern emerges which seems to suggest a correlation between the economic changes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that necessitated the subjugation of women. This confirms my position that the use of the motif was intentional. Understanding exactly how women have been historically instrumentalized as a way to support developing Western capitalist structures is necessary as America's economic shift into late-stage capitalism and the concurrent disintegration of women's rights to reproductive health care remind us of similar events centuries before. Further research might include the digitization of medieval records, more complete demographic analysis, records of patronage, revealing historical biases as well as ethnographies that might reveal information about the early believers.