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 […]
Category Archives: Emotions
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 […]
Prepare to be Spellbound: Our Ashmolean Exhibition is Now Open!
I’m delighted to announce that Spellbound: Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, the project’s exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on which I’ve been leading with art historian Marina […]
Now Booking! Living in a Magical World: Inner Lives, 1300–1900
St Anne’s College, Oxford 17–19 September 2018 #InnerLives18 An international conference organised and funded by the Leverhulme Trust research project Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity, and the Supernatural, 1300–1900. Introduction | Programme […]
The Devil in the Wilderness: ‘The Witch’ (2015) Revisited
New England, 1630. A man we know only as William is exiled from his palisaded colony for challenging its religious orthodoxy, and heads off into the wilderness in a rickety […]
‘A Pinching and Pricking at her Breast’: Bewitched Hearts in Early Modern England
When seventeenth-century people were bewitched they often took it to heart. In Jacobean Cornwall, after crossing Agnes Saunders, a Cornish gentleman is ‘extreemely distempered w[i]th so greate a heavines of […]
Call for Papers: Living in a Magical World: Inner Lives, 1300–1900
St Anne’s College, Oxford 17–19 September 2018 An international conference organised and funded by the Leverhulme Trust research project Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity, and the Supernatural, 1300–1900, with generous additional […]
Workshop Report: Approaching Inner Lives: Thinking, Feeling, Believing, 1300-1900
It is now a commonplace for every discussion of the history of the emotions to start with reference to an ‘affective turn’, but the overcoming of historians by emotion of […]
Creature Discomforts: Familiar Spirits in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets
In 1566 a sensational pamphlet was published in London that described the crimes of three women accused of witchcraft in Chelmsford, Essex. Elizabeth Francis, Mother Agnes Waterhouse, and Jone Waterhouse […]
