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: Project Updates
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Witch Stones and Demon Dogs: 6 Chilling East Anglian Landscape Legends
Since I joined the project in late 2016, a regular extracurricular activity has been a weekend jaunt from my base in Norwich into the countryside of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and […]
