The Blog is Going Monthly!

Yates Thompson 26Hello everyone. I’ve been doing my best to update this blog weekly since September, and it’s been an absolute blast. In the past I’ve only ever updated sporadically: when I had a strong idea for something that I couldn’t sell, or where edits changed a piece to the point where I felt there was a whole other article still to be written.

Since writing weekly, it’s been huge (to steal a Trumpism – I don’t like his politics, but we’ve got a disturbing similarity in lexicon…)

I’ve made friends, I’ve increased my social media followers, and I’ve tripled the rate of my study: there’s nothing that stimulates the mind and gets me learning better than the motivating pull of these blog posts raising questions and spurring me on to new areas.

More than that, the conversations these posts have prompted have hugely widened the scope of my knowledge, just in a few months, and given me a three dimensionality to my work that could only come from discussing it with people who knew what they were talking about.

This is why I’m committed to keep posting on my blog, BUT I’ve got a lot of work coming up this year. Continue reading “The Blog is Going Monthly!”

I’m talking about Fairies and the Witch Trials on the Folklore Podcast!

johann_heinrich_fussli_058

Hello everyone. Today’s blog post isn’t quite like my usual ones: it’s not an article in its own right, but instead a digest of things that I mentioned in the interview I did for the Folklore Podcast episode that went live today, but didn’t have time/the memory to develop on. If you want to listen to the cast, you can do it at the address below:

http://www.thefolklorepodcast.com/

You can find my episode (“Fairy Belief and the Witch Trials”) in Season Two. Continue reading “I’m talking about Fairies and the Witch Trials on the Folklore Podcast!”

Sceptics in the Witch Trials

woman_teaching_geometryI’m in the latest issue of The Skeptic at the moment, writing about standards of proof when looking at medieval and Early Modern sources (largely medieval in that article) who present the supernatural as fact. For me, critical thinking is an indispensably important part of what I do – although I wouldn’t say I identify as ‘a S(c/k)eptic’ in the sense that it’s arisen as a social group. There are sceptic pub nights, there are sceptic podcasts and magazines. That’s not me.

I’m not an anti-sceptic either. My personal beliefs are my own, and they’re not part of my historical work. If I’m honest with myself, perhaps the reason my work is about social history instead of being more phenomenological is because it’s a debate that I’d rather keep out of, in part because even if we can say (and we often can) that a certain thing didn’t happen, we can’t actually say what did. Continue reading “Sceptics in the Witch Trials”

Biblical Curses During the Era of the Witch Trials

Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden - stained glassFor this blog, spring is probably going to have a lot of articles about either cursing and diaries. I’ve got a paper coming up at a very exciting conference just as (hopefully) the weather is picking up (and by that, I mean ‘the temperature should be above 10°C’.) Therefore, the lion’s share of my writing will be taken up with research on cursing from the medieval era to the Early Modern.

Today’s will be the first of the cursing posts: curses and execrations were all around for the medieval and Early Modern citizen. It’s little wonder that, with the growing belief in providentialism that accompanied the Reformation, the English more and more believed that witches could lay lethally effective curses. Even the grave of William Shakespeare, a resolutely mainstream figure, is decorated with the words, “Good Friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

A significant part of the draw of the curse, as it existed in a licit context, was the idea of appeal to a higher power. Even in a modern society, with supposedly reliable access to the machinery of justice, a significant gap exists between law and practise. In medieval and Early Modern England, with courts convened cyclically, laws poorly understood, and where justice could be put on hiatus by anything from heavy rains to plague, an extra supernatural deterrent would have been reassuring. Continue reading “Biblical Curses During the Era of the Witch Trials”