In anticipation of Julie Taymor’s inspired and unique “gender-flipped” (to use the handy phrase provided by a Juggler reader) movie of The Tempest (wherein “Prospero,” the male Wizard, is re-imagined as “Prospera,” a female, played by Helen Mirren)- I find it difficult to settle upon a suitable word to describe Prospera.
Prospero is simple; he is a Wizard, a Renaissance Mage: meaning, one who studies long and wide upon the Esoteric Arts and Science of Magicke.
One would presume then that Prospera would be a Wizardess- acknowledging that to be a “made-up” word.
Otherwise she would (one imagines) fit into the gender-neutral categories of either Magician (“One Who Works Magicke”) or Magicke-User (to borrow a phrase imprinted from my Dungeons and Dragons junior adolescence). Technically correct- but sexually obscure.
What she would not be is a Witch. “Witch,” in 16th/17th century England, was a rural, village-level Wise-Woman who worked in the oral culture traditions of simple sorceries, charms, healings, prognostications, (occasionally hexes), herbs, images, and such like. Her forte was the common-people’s skills and arts known as “Witchcraft.”
This is very different from the High Ceremonial, excessively learned Magicke of the Renaissance Mage: obviously so, since the Wizard’s Arts depended upon reading and understanding the prior reflections of similar scholars- expressed in the books that they wrote and left behind as a legacy.
In short, one has to be literate in order to be a Renaissance Wizard- and no Elizabethan/Jacobean Witches were.
Sorceress and Enchantress come to mind- but they do seem to suggest Circe and Morgaine le Fay, rather than, say, John Dee or Rodger Bacon (two English cultural analogs to Prospero).
Frankly, as Prospero is a Mage (derived from the Latin Magus, meaning a “male User of Magicke”): Prospera would be a Maga (the Latin female version of Magus).
The problem being- who knows what a Maga is?
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