Before it was Hers

Centuries before the witch trials, a different story was already being told. Before It Was Hers traces how the knowledge that got women burned, herbalism, divination, the reading of bodies and signs, was the same knowledge held sacred when men practiced it inside churches, universities, and courts. The thread runs from the Book of Enoch's fallen angels through Tertullian's warnings about women's bodies, into the Malleus Maleficarum and the trial records of accused witches in early modern Europe.Woven between the scholarship are seven imagined wives of the Watcher angels, Sera, Mira, Lyra, Asha, Selah, Zara, Nara, each carrying knowledge passed mouth to ear, hand to hand. Their stories sit beside the history that would later condemn women like them, not as illustration, but as the buried half of the record.Part literary nonfiction, part reclaimed myth, this is a book about whose knowledge gets called wisdom, and whose gets called witchcraft.