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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
