Iselda

For my final project, I chose to write a series of journal entries belonging to a woman named Iselda Lefèvre who lived, furtively, as a traditional healer for women in the rurality surrounding Toulouse during the late 16th century. As seen in the accompanying photograph, I have also created Iselda’s journal with all her writings and illustrations in tangible form! In writing this story, I have researched and portrayed the witch trials that took place during the Middle Ages through a feminist lens, with a particular focus on the disproportionate demonization of women in these inquisitions. I have examined how in dubbing this historical event “the witch trials,” the use of the word “witch” in fact obscures its grim reality-- it was a mass genocide against innocent women. Accusations of witchcraft were widely used as tools to justify the annihilation of women and their bonding networks that defied societal norms and who consequently were potent threats to male-centered models of power, especially by their autonomy, independence, and digressions from gendered societal barriers. This cloaking of true intent and the displacement of blame is just as relevant today as it was then in many aspects of the women’s rights movement, notably the legislation over women’s bodies. In light of this, for the crux of my project, I sought to humanize Iselda’s story and the stories of women who faced the horrors of the witch trials as a war waged against both womanhood and sisterhood through an epistolary narrative, and by making the journal tangible to ground the story in a corporeal, imaginable reality, despite taking place five centuries ago!