Book Review: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici

 Hey, hi, hello reader

Welcome to one of my infrequent book reviews. This one will be a little different because it is a nonfiction title. 

I found this book on one of Bookshop.org's booklists. The title intrigued me so I checked it out from my local library (along with several other books on the same list, but they haven't come in yet). I was not disappointed, reader. 

Caliban and the Witch is an intersectional feminist look at the origins of capitalism in Europe. It's deeply and beautifully anticapitalist and has some great scholarship. I enjoyed it immensely. 

I'm always careful about the nonfiction I pick up, reader, since quality of scholarship varies greatly. History is one of those fields that tends to get trampled by people projecting modern interpretations on the past. I think Caliban and the Witch walked that line well, which was not easy given the subject matter of the book.

Federici did the work to explain the angle she was looking at Middle Age Europe from as well as tell the reader how these events related to capitalism now. I personally think she did a great job integrating economic history, gender history, and colonial history together. It's not easy to do, but it is necessary since picking a single lens to examine history through will narrow your focus so much that you might lose sight of other aspects. History is as complex as our modern day is and there are dozens of ways to view either one. 

Caliban and the Witch has six chapters, all of which are divided into subsections. First is a look at the social and political crises occurring in Medieval Europe. This includes a look at serfdom, how important the commons were to the lower classes, how women were involved in many of the heretical movements of the time, the struggles between the lower and the upper classes, the black death and the labor crisis it kicked off, and how sexual politics changed during this time.

The second chapter deals with the transition from serfdom to various forms of early capitalism in Europe. It talks about how enclosure of the commons affected people, with an eye especially on how it affected women, price inflation and wage lowering among the working class, how the state reacted to the growing number of urban poor and rural migrants, the criminalization of the working class, how women's work was redefined and devalued, how globalization and colonization affected women across class and ethnicity, and sex and race in the colonies.

Chapter three talks about how the body was redefined during this period to justify both slavery in the colonies as well as continued exploitation of wage workers and women.

Next is the chapter dealing with the witch hunts. This chapter talks about how the state was involved and how they encouraged witch hunting, how ideas about magic in Europe changed during this time, how witch hunting related to class and gender, how the societal view on women changed during this time, how witch hunting affected colonized areas, and how views on childbirth changed during this period as well.

The last chapter deals more with colonization and Christianization. It talks about how colonizers viewed indigenous peoples, how they exploited them and how they resisted this exploitation, how indigenous women were treated, and how witch hunting was globalized. 

In all, this is a great piece of scholarship. I'm genuinely thinking of picking up a copy of my own so I can annotate it. I highly recommend this if you're looking for an intersectional look at the Middle Ages. 

5/5 pumpkins

I also want to wish everybody a safe and happy holiday season. I shall leave you, reader, with a stack of Sumikko Gurashi. I love them very much and I want to share them with you. (Tokage the blue lizard is my favorite)

Until next time, reader 🎃