Events

More events coming soon

The Prostitute: society's rebel or victim?

Speaker - Dr. Mark Williams

29/03/2022 - 17:30 - 18:45

Part two of the series looks at the phenomenon of female prostitution in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The session takes a long view to look at female sexuality and gender construction over the early modern period in order to highlight the fundamental changes that took place in social understandings of both into the eighteenth century. From being seen as controlled by their sexual urges, women came to be understood as the ones whose virtue depended on sexual restraint and passivity, and who became newly vulnerable to seduction by men. These ideas about women generally therefore provided the framework for attitudes towards prostitutes in society. We will consider a typical profile of the women who entered into prostitution, as well as the reasons given by them for engaging in the practice. We will think about the dual portrayal of the prostitute as ‘bawdy and joyous’ or as ‘innocent and destitute’ by way of explaining fantasy versus reality, and consider how power was exercised by notable women such as the courtesan Veronica Franco.

For more information please email events@oldpolicecellsmuseum.org.uk

Witch Hunts or Women Hunts?

Speaker - Dr. Mark Williams

22/03/2022 - 17:30 - 18:45

To tie in with March being the month of International Women’s Day, this lecture session looks at the ways in which historians have understood the aspect of gender as a driver for the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. In parts of western Europe, around 75% overall of those accused of witchcraft were women whilst, in certain episodes, this figure was in excess of 95%.

This session takes an overview of historical interpretation over the past 50 years to examine the links between women and witchcraft. We start by looking at interpretations of the witch hunts as a ‘gynocide’, or targeted hunt of women by men, before considering how these arguments were both developed, to explain the phenomenon of women accusing other women, and how they were challenged, to examine the place of male witches and argue that the hunts were ‘sex-related’ but not ‘sex-specific’.

For more information please email events@oldpolicecellsmuseum.org.uk

Speaker (brief) biography

Dr. Mark Williams taught at the University of Kingston, and as an associate lecturer at the University of Chichester, where he taught modules on 'Magic and Superstition in Early Modern Europe’, and ‘Crime, Deviance and the State in Europe, 1450-1800’.