Revisiting "The Civilizing Process"

This book addresses the long-standing theoretical gap regarding the concepts of gender and religion within Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process. In doing so, it not only revisits the evidence used by Elias in his original work but also introduces an alternative lens through which to view this long-term change: the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions. Through a comparative and detailed study of witchcraft prosecutions in England and Scotland, and their presentation within the public sphere, Lucy Císar Brown develops a greater understanding of long-term transformations in the early modern period. The first consideration of this book is the centrality of religion to both medieval individuals and societal structures and their long-term transformation across the early modern period. The second consideration is whether the transformative processes of sociogenesis and psychogenesis can be applied in the same way to women as to the wider patriarchal society. In many respects these figurations are interdependent, both with each other and with the development of modern society, requiring a reassessment of the theoretical assumptions presented within The Civilizing Process. While detailed and comprehensive in many aspects of social development, the limitations of Eliasian social theory informs the fundamental character of this figurational analysis of early modern society.