Magical Thoughts: The Making of Spellbound
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 […]
Category Archives: Medieval
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 […]
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 […]
Coral: The Enduring Magic of the Medusa’s Blood
Coral is a complex marine organism and has a calciferous skeleton. It is sometimes blood red and is vascular in its form. Therefore in Greek legend it was said to […]
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 Sphere of Magical Thinking: The Enchanting History of Crystal Balls
In 1582 John Dee (1527–1609), mathematician, astrologer, magician, and antiquary, claimed that he had been given a magic crystal by an angel called Uriel. Eventually this slightly purple rock crystal, […]
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 […]
Intrigue and Incantation: Treasonous Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England
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 […]
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 […]
Melancholy Witches, Love Magic, and a Sinister Island: Inner Lives at #isch17
The project was on the road again last week for the tenth conference of the International Society for Cultural History (26–29 June 2017). The event took as its topic ‘Senses, […]
