When powerful women are remembered as witches, we should challenge the historical motive

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Reclaiming the label "witch" has become an act of feminist solidarity. But are we recovering the women themselves, or a posthumous identity built from accusation rather than fact?

Historical novelist Philippa Gregory's new novel Royal Witch arrives this fall soon after the much-trumpeted release of Practical Magic 2, with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman returning to our screens as the Owens sisters. Both tap into something powerful in contemporary culture. The witch has been reclaimed as a feminist figure: independent, knowledgeable, bonded to other women, resistant to authority.

But as a historian interested in how women's reputations change over time, I think our enthusiasm for reclaiming the witch comes with responsibility. Before we celebrate the label, we must ask why and whence it came. Royal Witch retells the story of Eleanor Cobham, a 15th-century woman whose extraordinary rise took her from relatively modest beginnings to the highest ranks of English power as duchess of Gloucester, married to a man briefly heir presumptive to the throne (Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, uncle to the young Henry VI).

Then, in 1441, everything collapsed. A formal inquiry revealed that Eleanor had commissioned scholars to cast King Henry VI's astrological chart and exposed her association with Margery Jourdemayne, the woman later notorious as the "Witch of Eye." Eleanor was publicly humiliated, her marriage was annulled and she was imprisoned for life. It makes Gregory's irresistible description of Eleanor, "the woman they called witch.

Who would have called herself queen," feel entirely natural. But the implied correlation between ambition and accusation is key. Eleanor belongs to a wider pattern in which the complicated political histories of powerful medieval women have gradually hardened into much simpler stories.

Take Joan of Navarre, another powerful medieval woman linked with witchcraft. A generation before Eleanor, Joan was the widow of Henry IV, stepmother to Henry V and to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and Eleanor's stepmother-in-law. Her fall from favor involved suspicions about split loyalties and the seizure of her dower lands.