So much of that rhetoric from what I’ve seen has to do with characteristics of the body: not only her physical appearance and youth, but also her disability. All in service of making her seem more abnormal, and thus delegitimizing her message.

There is no counsel for the defence. If you are found guilty, you could become one of the 30,000–60,000 people who were executed for witchcraft in the early modern era. The 11th century saw the arrival of Scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy meant that all of created nature became an object of scrutiny from which scholastics could create a model that applied to everything. The inquisitorial eye began to fix itself on aspects of folklore that had been smiled away or incorporated into Christian worship in earlier periods. The vicar in the village tells you that the dead that remain in the earth are those condemned to hell. Some people say that the dead riders are wreathed in flames, and their saddles are red-hot iron. Those people say that if you do get any power from the riders, it’s the power of hell and devils. Again, if you’re doing stuff that Protestants think is bad, there’s no grey area. There’s no room for tolerance. You’re either right or wrong. In that sense, it’s quite terrifying. It’s a terrifying worldview. And it persists to this day—it’s very similar to what we saw when the Harry Potter books were published in America.

Table of Contents

Briggs is a superb historian. I remember reading this book when it came out, and being blown away by it. It takes the reader deep into a world of social obligations (and their breaches) and networks of people, mostly in economically fragile farming communities. Here, witches reflected the anxieties of their neighbours, who therefore, in a sense, made witches: you can’t have one without the other.

I think one of the reasons that we find elderly women so horrifying is that they are literally a kind of dead end. We’ve now created a culture—good old us!—that is far, far more rigorously ageist than any culture previously on Earth. Girls at fifteen are having Botox before they even get any facial lines.Just one sister. She shared them with Anne, but when Charlotte discovered them, Emily was furious. Charlotte took to rooting around in Emily’s writing desk. They all had these writing slopes that they used with, inside them, a kind of compartment. Charlotte was evidently curious about what Emily was doing, so she came across the Gondel poems and Emily was livid. Absolutely livid. She wasn’t happy to share them with Charlotte, actually. There’s a degree of uncertainty as to how much of the poems she shared with Anne, as opposed to the scenes that the poems were part of, which might be a separate sharing. We foist the facts of the external narrative to match what we internally feel to be true, which is often nuanced, complicated and impossible to explain. Historians have long learned not to see witch-hunts as hysterical spasms of pre-Enlightenment ‘superstition’. Demonology was a serious subject in the sixteenth and seventeeen centuries, and was logically coherent within the mentalities of the time. Witchcraft, then, wasn’t some insane sideshow to the dominant legal, political and religious issues of the day, but central to those issues. Even in these early times, was the phenomenon gendered? I’ve heard that a common misconception is that all accused witches were women—the trope of the witch as an evil woman, or dark seductress—when actually, there may have been many men who were thought to be witches as well. Early witches were people who practiced witchcraft, using magic spells and calling upon spirits for help or to bring about change. Most witches were thought to be pagans doing the Devil’s work. Many, however, were simply natural healers or so-called “wise women” whose choice of profession was misunderstood.

That puts it brilliantly. Next, we have the poems of Edward Thomas, a poet of the First World War who one might not think of as a figure for thinking about ideas of witchcraft and the supernatural. Why did you choose this one? Moving on to the witches, I agree that it’s saying something absolutely gorgeous about a refusal to judge between ill effects and good effects and to discriminate. Earlier, you mentioned a big Victorian shift in how we view witches, witchcraft and the supernatural, and that many of our images of the witch today are formed by pre-Raphaelite ideas. Your last choice is The Poems of Emily Brontë. All the men are called Tom, which is also kind of interesting. Some of the women are called Janet, and some are called Marjorie or Meg. What Garner is doing there is drawing on the Tam Lim ballad; in different versions, the girl’s called Meg, and in other versions, she’s called Janet. It’s like all these different figures are incorporated into a single story. The Tom characters start having glimpses of one another’s thoughts. One character—the modern character—is saying goodbye to the modern Jan on the bus, and the bus is blue and silver, and the Roman Macey starts seeing blue and silver in his epileptic fits.You can find a translation of it now on the internet, but that’s not very interesting. So I sat there with a complete Lewis Carroll trying to work out what the keyword was. Interestingly, I had a student who worked it out from scratch a few years ago by working out that the first sentence must be ‘I love you’. Clara and the Curandera by Monica Brown, illustrated by Thelma Muraida:“‘ Once there was a little girl named Clara, who was grumpy.’ She was grumpy about having to take out the trash, having to share her toys with her seven brothers and sisters, and having to read one book a week for school. And Mami is tired of Clara’s grumpy face, so she sends her daughter to the curandera or healer to ask for help. The curandera gives Clara a list of things to do in the coming week: take out her own trash and the neighbors’ as well; give all of her favorite toys to her brothers and sisters; and read five books instead of one! It’s a difficult, busy week for Clara. But, when the week is over, Clara realizes that she has not had time to feel grumpy. Could it be that helping others makes her feel happy?

Hutton starts his discussion by outlining five characteristics of the European witch and the way these can be found worldwide. He suggests that this provides a common model on the basis of which historians and anthropologists can collaborate and obtain interactive insights. 1. A witch causes harm by uncanny means; 2. A witch is an internal threat to a community; 3. A witch works within a tradition; 4. A witch is evil; and 5. A witch can be resisted. These features produce a lot of variation taken from anthropological research. In passing Hutton introduces 'service magicians' as a new term for 'cunning folk', denoting magical specialists who were fighting against, or were consulted to help with, cases of malicious witchcraft. The advantages of Hutton's approach are that it strips 'witchcraft' to its bare essentials without contamining it with, for instance, possession, divination, shamanism, pagan religion, satanism, or 'occultism' in general. He proceeds to discuss ancient magic and witchcraft in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome and pays particular attention to the 'demonesses of the night', in a global context. The third chapter is dedicated to shamanism, and focuses on adjusting and refuting Carlo Ginzburg's theories on the subject. (3) One such figure was peculiar to the western Alps. She was the female embodiment of winter, a female figure often called Bertha or Perchta or Befuna. She punished social disobedience and rewarded ‘goodness’. She was always portrayed as an old hag, because she represented cold and winter. It did not take long for intellectuals to note her resemblance to the witches with whom they were familiar from classical literature.Absolutely. That’s right. It’s actually really touching. It’s also potentially a suicide note, but the novel is open-ended. If Janet in the 20th century manages to read the letter, she can prevent the suicide, but you don’t ever know whether that’s going to happen. So it feels like it’s on you, as the reader. It’s important to remember that it’s not just something that goes on in your head; it’s also something you do with your body. It’s something you have to invest in as an embodied and fleshed entity. So again, that’s me not liking dualism very much, and not being very comfortable with the idea that people aren’t their bodies. People are their bodies. Nor can you really control every function of your body in the way you can maybe control electric lights. The Crucible by Arthur Miller: “ Based on historical people and real events, Miller’s drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.” Before people were publicly identifying as Witches several books were released that helped “set the stage” so to speak. Without these books, Witchcraft as we know it today would be much different. I’m aware that there’s an earlier edition of this book, but the 1989 version is the one most of us are familiar with, and it was in every major bookstore throughout the 1990’s. Not only that, it was sometimes in the Feminism section and not the New Age or Witchcraft section at Barnes and Noble. Wow! This was the first easily available book articulating women-only Witchcraft, which makes it highly influential. (I often find myself in disagreement with Budapest-and that’s putting it mildly, especially when it comes to issues concerning trans-women.)