Object Lessons: The Concealed, Revealed, and Displayed
‘Any idea of value?’. This question was posed to me by the coordinators of the project’s exhibition Spellbound: Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, opening at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and […]
Author Archives: Ceri Houlbrook
Getting the Boot: The Magic of Shoes Workshop with Northampton Museum
‘I started work at Northampton Museum in the 1950s, and it was about 1957, in conversation with John Thornton, then head of the Boot and Shoe Department, Northampton College of […]
The Mysterious Case of the Three Hanging Bottles in the Sixteenth-Century Inn
It’s like the opening scene of a horror film. Kelly Appleton-Swaine, Buildings Conservation Officer for Heritage Lincolnshire, leads the way up the ladders and I follow suit. Clutching torches, we climb […]
Love’s Labour’s Found: An Intimate Archaeology of the Love-Lock
This Valentine’s Day, Ceri is hoping to catch some elusive Mancunian love-lockers in the act of locking their love. So she’ll be posting herself at Manchester’s iconic love-lock bridge throughout most […]
The Blackley Boggart at The Haunted Landscape Symposium
Last weekend (19 November) I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at ‘The Haunted Landscape: British Folklore and Ghosts’ symposium, organised by Scott Wood of the London […]
Exchanging Ideas at Special Deposits Workshop
Last week I presented a paper on the ‘Concealed Revealed’ project (see website here) at a workshop on ‘Coins, Hoards, and Special Deposits’, organised by Murray Andrews at the Institute […]
Witches, Revenants, and Demonic Hedgehogs: Review of Supernatural Spaces Workshop
Last week Malcolm and I were fortunate enough to be invited to the ‘Supernatural Spaces in the Early Modern World’ workshop. Organised by Jenny Spinks, lecturer in early modern history […]
Review of Ronald Hutton’s ‘Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts’
Back in 1987, archaeologist Ralph Merrifield asserted that magic and ritual ‘can be studied objectively like any other human behaviour, and archaeology can make a major contribution towards its investigation’ […]
Selfhood and the Supernatural at the Social History Society Conference
Last week the Inner Lives team assembled at Lancaster University for the Social History Society conference. As well as presenting a poster summarising the project (see below), we also ran […]
Magic in Manchester: An Exhibition at the John Rylands Library
Yesterday I was treated to a tour of the ‘Magic, Witches & Devils in the Early Modern World’ exhibition, curated by Jennifer Spinks and Sasha Handley. It’s held at the […]
