Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England by Charlotte Rose Miller and part of the Routledge Research in Early Modern History series, published in 2017. ISBN 978-1-4724-8549-6 A fresh and significant book on witchcraft accusations in Early Modern England In this book, Charlotte Millar uses 66 surviving pamphlets about witchcraft accusations in Early […]
Years ago, I wrote a short item for a local website about the town of Reading, UK became the home for hundreds of Danish prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars. That website is gone but you can read the item here. If you want to know more about this part of the history of […]
On the 2nd of June 1634 at the Reading Borough Court William and Edith Walls were accused of making Edward Bonavant ill by witchcraft. This serious accusation was made in a troubled town at a time when witchcraft was believed to be real, and causing harm by witchcraft a capital crime. The local authorities took […]
This book published by Routledge in 2020, is a long overdue re-evaluation of John Stearne. Stearne is often dismissed as Matthew Hopkins assistant during the 1645-7 witch hunt in East Anglia. It is based on Scott Eaton’s PhD research. The first chapter describes the wider context of the east Anglian witch hunt of 1645-7 and […]
It’s been a while since I posted anything here as I’ve been distracted with everything (gestures towards the state of the world and the pandemic). During 2020 I could only read familiar things such as Lord of the Rings but this year, I have managed to read some non-fiction books. Here are some short reviews […]
I’ve just finished reading the ‘Triumph of the Moon’ 2nd ed by Professor Ronald Hutton. A mighty tome about the rise of modern paganism, and how it developed out of the changes in society in the last couple of centuries. The book poses the question of why modern pagan witchcraft appeared in England in the […]
This essay compares religion in Reading in the middle of the 19th century with nearby southern counties and the rest of England to determine if Reading was typical or not. This essay will show Reading had a higher proportion of the population attending church and a more diverse religious population, and that this was due to local historical factors.
An essay I wrote a few years ago when I was doing the Advanced Diploma in Local History at Oxford. This essay explores how witches and witchcraft were perceived by society and how this changed from the late 17th century through to the 19th century. Society’s belief in and opinion of witchcraft is investigated by […]
Originally posted on Mercurius Politicus:
Here’s an image with which you are probably familiar. It’s a staple of lots of textbooks and narratives of the civil wars, and is commonly used to show how deep the conflict ran – even the dogs had to take sides. But on a closer look it reveals a rather…
Originally posted on Mercurius Politicus:
I’ve spent the past few weeks immersed in seventeenth-century pamphlets and as a result, have been reading a lot of background literature on printing, print culture, bibliography and the history of the book. Below are some scattered thoughts, based on what I’ve read, about different ways of approaching an early…
The visible effects of belief 