31 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in Books, History, Witchcraft
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Wishing you all a happy Halloween – and for the occasion, I’ve explored how women writers have transformed our ideas about witches over at For Books’ Sake.
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17 Tuesday Sep 2013
Posted in Art and Photography, History, Witchcraft
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Alexander Goudie, Durer, Edinburgh, Faust, Goya, Isobel Gowdie, Macbeth, Nannie Dee, Paula Rego, Scotland, William Blake, Witchcraft
Lachlan Goudie, son of the Scottish figurative painter Alexander Goudie, is an artist himself. In 1999, Alexander finished a cycle of paintings based on Robert Burns’ 1791 narrative poem, Tam o’ Shanter, about a farmer led astray by a young and beautiful witch, Nannie Dee. He was strongly influenced by the work of Albrecht Dürer and Francisco Goya. Continue reading
19 Friday Aug 2011
Posted in History, Television, Witchcraft
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Child Witnesses, Documentaries, Early Modern History, Jennet Device, Lancashire Witches, Pendle Witches, Phoebe Boswell, Simon Armitage, The Pendle Witch Child, Witchcraft
Simon Armitage – one of Britain’s leading poets – was born in West Yorkshire. Like many local children, he would have been raised on stories of the Pendle Witches in nearby Lancashire.
A grimly intoxicating blend of history, crime and folklore is richly evoked in Armitage’s new BBC Four documentary, The Pendle Witch Child. Next year marks the fourth centenary of the notorious 1612 trial, the largest of its kind in England at the time. Continue reading
24 Saturday Jul 2010
Posted in Books, History, Non-Fiction, Witchcraft
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Early Modern History, Joyce Froome, Lancashire, Museum of Witchcraft, Pendle Witches, Wicked Enchantments, Witchcraft
Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches and Their Magic by Joyce Froome
With its 400th anniversary approaching, the Pendle witch trial of 1612 is once again the focus of historical discussion. What was the largest investigation of its kind in England (until the Matthew Hopkins purges in East Anglia some thirty years later) is now, ironically, a mainstay of the East Lancashire tourist industry.
In 2007, John C. Clayton’s The Lancashire Witch Conspiracy brought a new focus on local history and genealogy to the now legendary case. This year, Joyce Froome, an assistant curator at the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall, has brought her own knowledge of magic to the table. Continue reading
12 Saturday Sep 2009
Posted in Brighton, History, Periodicals, Witchcraft
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HerStoria is a new quarterly magazine, launched in Liverpool this February. Its byline is ‘history that puts women in their place’. Women’s role in history has sometimes been overlooked, though the same could also be said for other groups such as the working class and non-whites. Focussing on their stories helps us to understand the past as experienced by society at large, and not only through the narrow perspective of ruling elites. Continue reading
Tara Hanks 
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