Between the 1320s and the 1620s a significant proportion of all accusations of high treason in England involved a magical element. People were accused of casting the horoscope of the […]
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 […]
A man hides under a bed, terrified. He has escaped, but is not yet safe. When asked from what exactly he is hiding, he cries out: ‘Mother is looking to […]
In 1781, Henry Fuseli painted his now-famous depiction of The Nightmare. The painting (above) depicts a woman lying on her back in bed. She appears asleep or in a deep […]
Like many a small boy it was the witches in Macbeth that first focussed my attention on Shakespeare. I can remember thinking their melodramatic presence merited a more important place […]
If the Twilight films have taught us anything, it’s that vampires are brooding, irresistible creatures, with whom it’s possible to fall madly in love. Historical vampires did not usually instil […]
The idea for this post began with an exchange on Twitter with the Inner Lives project – stimulated by this innocuous-sounding Tweet promoting the excellent supernatural holdings of the Museum […]
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German abbess, writer, composer, mystic, and visionary. To anyone unacquainted with her writings, her description of the ‘cosmic egg’ cosmos in Book One Vision […]
Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Mélusine is a remarkable romance in its use of interiority and emotion to ground a supernatural plot in a believable emotional context. Written in 1392, it […]
While researching my UCL master’s dissertation on ‘Magic, Illusions and Deceptions of the Sight’, I came across an illuminating and relatively under examined topic: magic as an expression of humour […]
