Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

This thesis project builds on the philosophical reflections developed by Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (or by Silvia Federici and Alicia Puleo in their respective essays). She argues that the status of women is the result of a systematic subjugation -–which runs parallel to the capitalist exploitation of nature– imposed by the founding fathers of modern science. As a social and mental construct, the enterprise to annihilate all the rebellious women would culminate in the witch-hunts conducted by the Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the witch figure has inhabited Western imagination for centuries, the last ten years have seen films and novels flourish in Romance-speaking countries (Italy, France, Spain), which fictionalise these same historical facts, highlighting the tension between dissident or learned women (midwives, herbalists, etc.) and a repressive patriarchal order hiding behind the argument of reason. The purpose of the thesis is to study these historical narratives from a socio-critical and eco-feminist perspective, in order to measure the ability of literature and the arts to work on representations, to deconstruct a cultural heritage imbued with a patriarchal ideology, and on the contrary to rehabilitate an invisible cultural ‘matrimony’. How can rethinking representations of the past ultimately influence the present and the future, at a time when “new witches” – from feminists denouncing gender violence to ‘green witches’ reinventing new ways of inhabiting the world – are also being hunted down?

Supervisors

Chiara Lombardi (UNITO)

Pascale Peygara (UPPA)

The thesis is held in cotutelle between the universities of Pau (France) and Torino in the mark of the Choral program (UNITA). More information on the website: https://www.research.univ-unita.eu/en/choral-project/laureate-cohort-1.html