For his efforts he was praised by his people as their champion against the ' injurious wild. In response, Margrave Georg Friedrich of Brandenburg-Ansbach organized a series of hunts directed against wolves, bears, and wild boars. Herdsmen complained of the dev-astation wolves wreaked on their flocks, and one shepherd was bitten by a bear. In late sixteenth-century Franconia, for example, attacks by wolves and even bears were frequent. Attacks by wild and domestic animals were not uncommon occurrences, and communities in border regions and mountainous areas were particularly susceptible to attack. 1 This tale, retold by Ambrose Bierce to illustrate the depths of Christian, and particularly Catholic, ignorance and superstition, points to a situation which the people of medieval and Renaissance Europe would not have found so amusing as their modern counterparts. If they did this, he assured them, the next morning they would have a Lutheran. Their priest explained that whenever they caught a wolf they should tie it by the neck.

When they awoke the next morning, the wolf was gone. There is an old story about a group of Bavarian peasants who captured a wolf and tied it to a tree. Especially given the field’s theological roots, examining the constructed relationships between religion and magic, both of which represent crucial foci for early theorists, through the analytical lens of gender, which does not, provides opportunities to surface implicit assumptions of the current field about what is and is not worth studying. Between these historical moments we have the beginning of the academic study of religion, the theoretical turn in which Christian-dominant scholarship comes to see itself on a continuum with, rather than opposed to, different religions, as first characterized by cultural evolution theories about the origins of religion. On the other, we have contemporary political and religious communities that use the identification as Witches to reverse this version of dichotomous Christian gaze and legitimize religious difference, which also comes to be symbolized by a female body. On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an early modern European Christianity trying to understand itself through contrast with an imagined heresy that comes to be personified with a woman’s face.

This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies.

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