This sentiment was further espoused in the witch-hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum (1486), which helped bring about a clear definition of the ‘female’ witch during the sixteenth century. One work by Clive Hart published in Germany in 1595 argued that women were not human. Theorists continued to debate whether women were indeed human during this period. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) viewed women as imperfect men, (or less developed humans) a view that still held sway during the Renaissance.
In this way, the female body was a monstrosity and made her ‘Other’ in the patriarchal society of the early modern period, which was a view that extended back to antiquity. Īnyone who was thought to possess animal characteristics were a monstrosity, as only humans possessed a soul and were capable of salvation. While thick body hair turned men into monsters, long locks or body hair on women merely revealed their natural state of depravity and monstrosity. They were also already partly regarded as sub-human and closer to animals than man. The image of the female monster was relatively absent in German Renaissance prints, in the same way that women were often suppressed and occluded from patriarchal society. Man feared breaking the boundaries between humans and animals as they began to see their physical resemblance and shared behaviours with other species in what was viewed as degeneration of society at a time of moral reform.
These monstrous hybrid creatures were predominately male, exhibiting the animalistic nature of man within.
This phenomenon is particularly evident in the prevalence of pictorial prints featuring these creatures dated in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, produced in the regions of Germany, around the time of the European witch-hunts and Protestant Reformation. The concept of shape-shifting and representations of human-animal hybrids in both literary sources and the visual arts captured the early modern European imagination. Keywords: Witches, body hair, wild woman, werewolves, sexuality
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