Witches at Night: Creative Responses to Early Modern Witch Trials
In the 1613 pamphlet Witches Apprehended, Examined and Executed, a servant gossips about a local woman he believes to be a witch. As he speaks, he is struck by a […]
Category Archives: Early Modern
Nordic Noir: Creating Denmark’s First Museum of Witchcraft
In December 2018 a small group from the Museum of Southwest Jutland in Denmark, consisting of Lulu Anne Hansen (Head of Historical Research), Mette Slyngborg (Curator), Louise Lindgaard (Research Assistant), […]
The Witch of Loddon and Changing Perceptions of Witchcraft in Victorian England
There are many stories of witchcraft in rural England from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it is rare to find accounts of self-professed witches who actually attempted to make […]
Book Review: The Familiars by Stacey Halls
The 1612 Pendle witch trials in Lancashire began when the peddler, John Law, refused to sell his pins to Alizon Device. Following the encounter, Law was stricken with a sickness […]
Conference Report: Living in a Magical World: Inner Lives, 1300–1900
Historians have learned to appreciate the supernatural as integral to past lives. No longer are magical beliefs and practices anachronistically condescended to as ‘superstitions’, entertained only by a credulous minority […]
Dog Days: Making The Black Shuck
A ferocious hound, an omen of death, a guardian to lonely women, the size of a horse, the size of a calf, two glowing red eyes, one red eye. The […]
Magical Thoughts: The Making of Spellbound
Our exhibition Spellbound: Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, led by Sophie Page with art historian Marina Wallace, has disappeared into the ether and […]
Image Magic: Drawing the History of Sorcery, Ritual, and Witchcraft
In October last year I was sent an email accompanied by a zip folder full of images; these included a witch and her familiars, a woman suffering from convulsions, an […]
Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter: Norway’s Forgotten Witch
When thinking of witch trials in Norwegian history, the case of Lisbeth Pedersdatter Nypan and her husband Ole often springs to mind. The case was brought to international attention with […]
Walking the Pendle Witch Trail
One of the unexpected highlights of my work on the Inner Lives project has been my regular extracurricular jaunts into the East Anglian countryside in search of supernatural, and especially […]
Inner Lives 