Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Hans Baldung Grien’s images of women as witches depicted the female body as a toxic entity whose poison manifests itself naturally, and dangerously, in menstruation. A prominent artist in Strasbourg during the early Reform, Hans Baldung Grien (1484/86—1545) received patronage from among elite humanists, wealthy Reformists, conservative Catholic sponsors, educated merchants, and aristocrats. He created paintings, woodblock prints, and drawings on the theme of toxic femininity. Made for an elite, erudite audience, these works shaped his career from beginning to end. Though judged obscene in later centuries, in their era and milieu, Baldung’s images of the corrupt and corrupting feminine body reflected many mainstream discourses concerning corporeal, feminine evil in currency among both classical humanists and conservative scholastics in early 16th-century Germany. Woman’s defective nature was constructed as an imperfect reflection, or ‘inversion,’ of the masculine, which also contributed to her depravity, perversity and inferiority. The evident sign of this was menstruation, among a wide cross-section of related signifiers. Baldung introduced ideas of feminine moral pollution and the psycho/spiritual taint of menstruation (and its converse, amenorrhea) consistently into his figurations of witches, in his depictions of their bodies, attributes, and activities. In constructing his detailed and highly influential iconography of witchcraft, Baldung gave powerful visual expression to Late Medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as ‘poison maiden,’ ‘venomous virgin,’ ‘death and the maiden, Fall of Man, eschatological, anti-Semitic themes and motifs, which issued from (and contributed to) the construction of the heresy of witchcraft as a ‘natural’ outgrowth of feminine defect.