Malcolm Gaskill, an emeritus professor in early modern history at UEA, wrote in the LRB about his decision to leave academia. His books include Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans and The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World; the latter was shortlisted for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. He is writing a book about Allied POWs and partisans in wartime Italy.
The Tudors knew all about the uncertainty caused by weak leadership and isolation on the world stage. After the break with Rome, complete by 1534, England stood alone. Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule. The economy was beset by inflation,...
It is a semantic enclosure for variants from folklore, the Bible, product branding, Halloween parties and newspaper cartoons. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be heroines and healers or hexing hags. What classification can bracket such diversity? Roald Dahl offers a clue in The Witches, where he suggests that real witches don’t wear pointy hats and ride broomsticks but look normal.
On 15 August 1737 Samuel Wood was working in a windmill on the Isle of Dogs, when a rope tied around his wrist became caught in the gear wheels. The gigantic brake-wheel pulled him into the mechanism, tearing off his right arm. Wood staggered a short distance before collapsing. Bystanders staunched the wound with sugar, which was known to have antiseptic and healing properties, while they...
In autumn 1937 a statue of Katharina Kepler was unveiled in Eltingen, the village near Stuttgart where she had been born three centuries earlier. Barefoot, wearing a shift, sickle in hand, she represented the ideals of rustic nobility and honest toil cherished by the Third Reich. The mayor said that Frau Kepler also stood for the determination to uphold truth in the face of persecution:...
Mary Parsons revealed that she had chosen to marry her husband because she suspected him of practising witchcraft. She was arrested, watched closely during the night and grilled about her belief that...
April 1944. Winston Churchill sent a memo to Herbert Morrison at the Home Office: Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost...
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