From the peasant revolts to the Great European Witch Hunt: the crushing of occult traditions and women´s reproductive freedom in the transition to capitalism
A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici´s history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women´s reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.