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In this edition of Morbid Anatomy Book club, join our founder Joanna Ebenstein as we discuss Caliban and the Witch, a provocative and fascinating book in which Italian‑American feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were not simply medieval superstition but a political project that destroyed communal ways of life, criminalized forms of female autonomy, and normalized unpaid reproductive labor in the home. By pairing “Caliban” (a figure for colonized and enslaved peoples) with the “witch,” she shows how racialized and gendered violence were tightly intertwined in the making of modern capitalism. Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, she traces how enclosure, colonial conquest, and the mass persecution of “witches” reshaped gender, the family, and the body from the late Middle Ages onward.