The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen's Häxan
Alexander Doty, Patricia Clare Ingham
Published on August 8, 2014 by punctum books
- Pages
- 84 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-0-692-23015-2 (Paperback)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: ART057000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: 1DND, 1DNS, 3MPBGH, ATFA
Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Swedish/Danish film Häxan(opens in new tab) (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film’s formal strangeness, a mixture of quasi-documentary with fictional episodes, illustrated lectures alongside docudrama recreations and dreamscapes. Is this a documentary, a horror flick, or both? In this chapbook, authors Doty and Ingham argue that the puzzle of Christensen’s Häxan might be unraveled by attending to the film’s provocative and paradoxical medievalism, its fantasmatic rendering of the witch as a medieval monster. Such monstrous medievalism, moreover, sheds considerable light on the politics of gender and culture once the witch is rendered a female figure in a time out-of-joint.
Biographies
When, in 1995, Patricia Clare Ingham left California for her first academic job, she was lucky enough to land on the faculty with Alex Doty at Lehigh University. With an MA and PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she joined the faculty of English at Lehigh, where she taught medieval literature and language, critical theory, Gender Studies, and whined about winter. She is the author of Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Pennsylvania, 2001), co-editor (with Michelle Warren) of Postcolonial Moves Medieval Through Modern (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and currently serves as co-editor of the award-winning journal, Exemplaria. She has published a number of articles on medieval romance, psychoanalysis, and Chaucer, and her book, The Medieval New: Ethical Encounters in an Age of Innovation will be out from University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. She is particularly grateful for having had the opportunity to collaborate with Alex, misses him madly, and is especially proud of an article they co-authored: “The ‘Evil Medieval’: Gender, Sexuality, and Miscegenation in Val Tournier’s Cat People,” in the collection Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (SUNY, 2003). She currently teaches English at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Genres
- Moving Image
- Premodern
Keywords
- cultural studies
- film
- horror
- medieval studies
- witchcraft