Beskrivning
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.
”It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity’s agenda.” Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged”.
The title of the book references Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Caliban’s mother was the witch Sycorax:
- This mis-shapen knave,
- His mother was a witch; and one so strong
- That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
- And deal in her command without her power.
