Why the English Never Tortured Witches
This blog post comes from a conversation I had with someone in a pub. I can’t remember how the conversation had come around to witches – it was somewhere between one of them having a go at me for not...
View ArticleMedieval Chroniclers and the Demonization of Fairies
I’ve already written about fairies in the witch trials on this blog. While it would be inaccurate to say that witches represented a survival of some pre-Christian Pagan religion, the idea of Pagan DNA...
View ArticleWhy Didn’t the Witches Use Magic to Escape Their Captors?
For anyone studying the history of Witchcraft, this title is the question that you can’t quite believe nobody asked. In the pamphlet, The Severall Facets of Witch-crafte (1585), we can observe the...
View ArticleDid King James Believe in Witches (English Edition)
In the second of our articles about the Witch trials of King James VI (see the note at the bottom of my previous article to explain why I’m not calling him ‘James VI & I’) we shall take up James’...
View ArticleDoctors Strange: Early Modern Surgeons, Demonic Possession, and Witchcraft
In writing the social history of the supernatural, it’s all too easy for to create a pantheon of heroes and villains. For heroes we have educated doctors and humanists fighting fanatical magistrates,...
View ArticleGhosts of Christmas Past: Christmas Ghost Stories, Scandinavian Revenants,...
This post comes with apologies for my not having posted anything last week. I was giving a rather fun lecture on Prospero at the Rose Playhouse, Bankside: a fantastic archaeological trust that also...
View ArticleI’m talking about Fairies and the Witch Trials on the Folklore Podcast!
Hello everyone. Today’s blog post isn’t quite like my usual ones: it’s not an article in its own right, but instead a digest of things that I mentioned in the interview I did for the Folklore Podcast...
View ArticleDid the North Berwick Witches Actually Do Any Magic?
Blog readers have my apologies for the lateness of this, the first post of my monthly blogging — February has seen me contract Vestibular Neuronitis, a condition affecting my balance. As such February...
View ArticleBlackness and the Demon in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
This is very much a work in progress and all input is gratefully received. I have deliberately steered away from making any analogy with modern society simply because I don’t have the expertise to do...
View ArticleAstaroth: from Female Deity to Male Demon
Yes, it may also be Erishkigal, but sod it. So, Hertfordshire University’s Open Graves, Open Minds unit have been running a ‘demon of the day’ campaign on Twitter this week. I’ll confess, as someone...
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