Faith And Fury: The Last Witches of England with Dr John Callow

Описание: This lecture celebrates the launch of John Callow's new book: 'The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition' which launches on the day of this lecture. You can purchase the book through our website here: https://bit.ly/2ZeDNXd

On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Within hours, his household had convinced itself that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy their lives. As the result of these allegations, three old beggar women from Bideford – Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards, and Mary Trembles - came to be identified as witches and a full-scale witch hunt shook the town. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to hang, as the last group of women to be executed for the crime in English history. Yet, the hatred of their neighbours endured. For Bideford, it was said, remained a place of witches.

Ignored, reviled, and extinguished but never more than half-forgotten, the memory of these three women - their deeds and sufferings, both real and imagined – has been transformed from hatred to regret, and from regret into celebration. The horror of their judicial murder was discussed in the Parliamentary debates that saw the last of the witchcraft acts repealed, while their names were chanted, as both inspiration and incantation, by women far beyond the wire at Greenham Common.

In this talk, John Callow explores this remarkable reversal of fate, and the tale of want, sorcery and savage persecution that created the Bideford Witches.

John Callow is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Suffolk, UK, who has written widely on early modern witchcraft, politics, and popular culture. He is the author of King in Exile: James II and Embracing the Darkness. A Cultural History of Witchcraft, and co-author with Prof. Geoffrey Scarre of Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe. He has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 documentary It Must be Witchcraft, and the series on the Salem Witches on the Discovery Channel in the USA.