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.
About the Author
Silvia Federici (born 1942) is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984 to 1986.
Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Silvia Federici has received more than 450,012 page views. Her biography is available in 22 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 20 in 2019). Silvia Federici is the 593rd most popular philosopher , the 1,713th most popular biography from Italy and the 44th most popular Italian Philosopher.
