Testing, Testing, 1,2,3...
Hello,My name is Sheilagh Ilona O'Brien, and this is the first post to my little academic blog on witches, witchcraft, and magic in the early modern period, and beyond. I am a PhD candidate at the...
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"[A]nd he wold be a husband to her...": Marriage to the Devil in the East...
Hi there! I thought it might be interesting to begin this blog with one of the more bizarre aspects of the trials I focus on in my doctoral thesis: women who claimed to have married the Devil.This is...
View Article"Where God hath a temple, the [D]evil will have a chapel": Roman Catholics,...
This post began as a response to the oft-repeated questions I got from other academics and friends on how many Recusants were tried for witchcraft and/or what is the connection between witchcraft and...
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Crayfish and Monkeys and Dogs! Oh My!
image viaL.P. Hartley wasn’t wrong when he said ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’; he was just woefully understating the case. When you first encounter many aspects of...
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Daemoni, etiam vera dicenti, non est credendum
Even when the Devil tells the truth, he must not be believed.via One of the interesting Latin phrases my father taught me was Daemoni, etiam vera dicenti, non est credendum. The idea that the Devil is...
View ArticleThe Long Shadows of Montague Summers and Margaret Murray
Over the next few weeks I want to discuss some modern representations of witchcraft or uses of the term witch. I want to compare and contrast them with early modern examples. In order to do this, I...
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Malleus Maleficarum
*Note, this blog contains some obscenities. If you find that offensive, please do not continue reading.When it comes to fictional witches on our television screens (or our computers or tablets, come to...
View Article"Hags"?: Transformation and the problem of age in modern fantasy and fairytales
What do the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996-2003), the musical Into the Woods (2014), the film of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (2007), and Doctor Who's “The Shakespeare Code” (2007) have in...
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Wiccans and Margaret Murray’s ‘Witch-Cult’ in Popular Culture
via The representation of witches and witchcraft I will discuss today are amongst those I personally find the least interesting. Primarily this is because there were no ‘wiccans’ in early modern...
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Distance and Sabbats in early modern English ‘witch plays’
This week’s post will be short and sweet, and be my first return to the early modern period in four weeks.viaIn her book Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550-1750, Marion Gibson pointed...
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The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton
I am afraid I have been very unwell and ended up in hospital this week, so the post on flying witches hasn’t been finished. So in the interest of getting a post up on time (while also getting my...
View ArticleBlogging elsewhere
Please have a look at my post and article over at Cerae:http://ceraejournal.com/2015/11/25/a-most-strange-witch-pamphlet-a-most-certain-strange-and-true-discovery-of-a-vvitch-1643/And if you haven't...
View ArticleViolent rhetoric and its poisonous effects
Today it seems that everywhere I look I see acts of violence fuelled by a rhetoric of hate, and I think that something must be said about that.This blog usually concerns itself with academic tidbits,...
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