Veriditas

A Short History of Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

The origins of Saint Valentine's Day lie shrouded in obscurity. Saint Valentine himself, a third century Roman martyr, seems to have nothing to do with the romantic traditions that became associated with his feast.

Dr. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakespeare, cited in The Book of Days, writes:

It was the practice in ancient Rome, during a great part of the month of February, to celebrate the Lupercalia, which were feasts in honour of Pan and Juno. whence the latter deity was named Februata, Februalis, and Februlla. On this occasion, amidst a variety of ceremonies, the names of young women were put into a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. The pastors of the early Christian church, who, by every possible means, endeavoured to eradicate the vestiges of pagan superstitions, and chiefly by some commutations of their forms, substituted, in the present instance, the names of particular saints instead of those of the women: and as the festival of the Lupercalia had commenced about the middle of February, they appear to have chosen St. Valentine's Day for celebrating the new feast, because it occurred nearly at the same time.

The first mention of Valentine's Day traditions in England originate from the 14th century writers Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower who both allude to the folk belief that birds choose their mates on the feast of Saint Valentine, their patron.

In Britain, the mating flights of crows, rooks, and ravens can generally be observed by February 14. Here in Lancashire, I notice more and more birdsong each day as February advances and the birds repair their nests, preparing for a new cycle of birth and life.

Around 1440, John Lydgate's poem in honour of Queen Katherine, widow of Henry V, is the first to mention romantic traditions among humans associated with this date:

To look and search Cupid's calendar,
And choose their choice, the great affection.

People of both sexes sent tokens of admiration. You could either send a token to the romantic interest of your choice, or draw lots as to who would receive your Valentine. In 1470s Norfolk, the Paston family seems to have perferred drawing lots rather than sending tokens to a chosen person.

Actual Valentines could be quite costly. In 1523, Sir Henry Willoughby, gentleman of Warwickshire, paid 2S, 3d for his. Unfortunately no description of this costly item remains for us today.

After the Reformation, the feast of Saint Valentine was abolished, and yet the amorous traditions flourished.

By 1641, the system of casting lots for Valentines was so well known in Edinburgh that a wag waggishly proposed their new Lord Chancellor be chosen by the same method.

A Dutch visitor to London in 1663 observed:

it is customary, alike for married and unmarried people, that the first person one meets in the morning, that is, if one if a man, the first woman or girl, becomes one's Valentine. He asks her name which he takes down and carries on a long strip of paper in his hat band, and in the same way the woman or girl wears his name on her bodice; but it is the practice that they meet on the evening before and choose each other for their Valentine, and, come Easter, they send each other gloves, silk stockings, or sometimes a miniature portrait, which the ladies wear to foster the friendship.

In his diaries of the same decade, Samuel Pepys reveals how he would call by a colleague's house early in the day in order to make the man's daughter his Valentine. Pepys would also arrange for a young man to call to pay the same homage to Mrs. Pepys and bring her presents, which Pepys then paid for. One year when Pepys was short of cash, alas, no young man with presents appeared and Mrs. Pepys was quite irate. Eventually they settled on a yearly ritual, whereby Pepys's cousin paid a visit to honour Mrs. Pepys and bring her presents which Pepys knew she desired.

Sources:

The Book of Days

Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain

Witch Persecutions, Women, and Social Change: Germany 1560-1660

2012-01-15T05:08:00.000-08:00

PART FOUR, Last in a series

Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three
.

The late 16th and early 17th century was an era of radical social, economic, and religious change. As women had much to lose, they had reason to rebel. And they remained a threat to the new social order. Art of this period often depicted women as insubordinate and wanton: beating their husbands, swilling wine, and lustfully dragging men to bed (Merchant 133). Reformer John Knox was of the opinion that if a woman was presumptuous enough to rise above a man, she must be "repressed and bridled" (Ibid 145). This was one of the most bitterly misogynistic eras ever known.

Political and religious leaders seemed terrified by their fear that witches had organized themselves into a secret female society, as described in Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum and King James's Daemonologie, among other works.

During witch trials, the witchfinders obsessively tried to force the accused to describe what went on at the alleged sabbat and to name the other women she had seen there. Georg Pictorious, a physician and scholar at the University of Freiburg in Germany, believed that witch persecutions were the only way humanity might be saved from these evil women. He maintained that if all the witches "are not burned, the number of these furies swells up in such an immense sea that no one could live safe from their spells and charms" (Midelfort 59).

In the 1970s and 1980s, some feminist historians such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English drew on Margaret Murray's study from the 1920s, The Witch Cult of Western Europe, to try to prove that there was indeed a secret society of women who practiced magic as part of an organized pagan cult. (See Ehrenreich and English's Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers)

While these speculations are very interesting, scant evidence exists to support this theory and most of it is based on torture-induced confessions.

It is, however, safe to state that people during the period of the witch persecutions sincerely believed and feared the existence of a secret female society.

Witches were believed to be a threat to both Christianity and to the middle class as it struggled to gain social authority (Hoher 46). The anti-puritan, plebian culture of lower class women stood in the way of the new values of the emerging bourgeois society. The stereotype of an organization of women out of control of society, women who cursed their enemies and mocked Christianity with their bizarre orgies, is perhaps indicative of an actual grain of reality behind the public fears. Hoher suggests that the rapidly changing society in Early Modern times, the role of the individual in a world that seemed increasingly confusing and uncertain, led to a collective insecurity--a fear that society would regress into old feudal traditions and chaos.

This fear was taken out brutally on those who would not integrate into the new order. The continuing disorder of the rural plebian culture and the refusal to conform to the new system took shape in the paranoia of the witch craze. Women, who according to Thomas Aquinas, Kramer, Sprenger, and others, were by nature weak-willed and sensual, were feared as the chief representatives of this rebellion--the chaos of uncontrolled nature and sexuality that must be subdued. Thus, it was these disorderly, uncontrollable women who were the most feared and hated. For the new order to survive, these women must be brutally exterminated (Ibid 42).

In examining the chronology of the witch trials, we see that the first trials targeted mainly poor, elderly women. As time went on and rich people and men started being accused, the witch hunts were considered to have got out of hand and they lost popular support. By this time, however, the new capitalism and religious order had been firmly established and the persecutions were no longer necessary.

This chronology reveals clearly what interests were at stake. The earliest trials of the 1560s focused almost exclusively on poor, older women. In the early trials of Wiesensteig and Rothenburg, 95 to 100% of the accused fit this stereotype. As the witch hunts progressed and the accused were tortured to name other witches, more and more men and upper class people were implicated (Midelfort 179). In Ellwangen in 1615, "accusations and convictions of highly placed and undoubtedly honorable men must have shaken people into recognizing that something had gone wrong" (Ibid 105).

Slowly the caricature of the witch as an old peasant woman was breaking down, "leaving society with no protective stereotypes, no sure way of telling who might be, and who could not be, a witch" (Ibid 182). Witch hunting so thoroughly shook up normal bonds of social trust that the most respected members of the community were no longer immune. The trials began to draw more and more criticism. Finally in 1672, the council of Altdorf in Schwaben declared all accusations of witchcraft illegal (Ibid 82). By this time, the persecutions had accomplished their original goal--the subjugation of rebellious lower class women and firmly entrenching those who survived the witch hunts into a subordinate domestic role. By the late 17th century we have no more illustrations of threatening, insubordinate women asserting their power.

Why this emphasis on poor and elderly women and why the last half of the 16th and first half of the 17th century? This period was crucial for the development of modern capitalism, a stricter moral code, and the placement of women into a narrowly defined domestic sphere, with utter economic dependence on their father or husband. The women who would most likely resist, at least in the early years of the persecutions, would be the older peasant women who remembered and clung to the old ways of plebian agrarian culture, the domestic economy, and the social and economic power they enjoyed. Such women would not easily relinquish their economic independence, their right of subsistence, or their personal freedom. The young woman beating her husband with her distaff, the symbol of her economic independence, in the early 16th century, became the old woman accused of witchcraft fifty years on. Note that in the 16th century illustrations I have included here, the old witch is depicted not with a broomstick but with her distaff.

Post-menopausal women were unburdened by pregnancies and childbirth. This gave them more freedom, time, and energy to stir up trouble. The accused witches' descriptions of the sabbat sound like the witch hunters' perversion of the joys of plebian peasant culture--drinking, dancing, and uninhibited celebration and sexuality. The earthly pleasures of the older generation became the evil heresy of the next. Since the descriptions of the alleged sabbat were drawn by torture, we must be cautious when drawing conclusions, but it makes a certain amount of sense in this historical context.

The women who had been strong, economically independent, and pleasure-loving members of the previous generation would not throw away their old privileges easily, so they became the witches of the new generation, a threat to society that had to be violently subdued for the new order to become established.

Sources:

Hoher, Friederike, "Hexe, Maria und Hausmutter--zur Geschichte der Weiblichket im Spaetmittelalter," Frauen in der Geschichte (Vol III) Kuhn/Rusen, (eds.). Padagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1983.

Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1979.

Midelfort, Erik, H.C., Witch Hunting in Southwest Germany 1562-1684: The Social Foundations Stanford, 1972.

Ruether, Rosemary, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.

Note: This essay was my Senior Paper I wrote in 1988 while an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. Some of the sources may seem dated, but I think most of the history still stands up.

In recent years some serious scholars have revisited Margaret Murray's contention that there was indeed a secret female society in Europe during the period of the witch persecutions. See Carlo Ginzburg's book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath and Emma Wilby's brilliant new book The Visions of Isobel Gowdie.

This website provides an interesting and well-researched view into medieval folk magic and possible pagan survivals in evidence before the beginning of the witch persecutions.

Hildegard comes home

2011-11-23T03:50:00.000-08:00

Hildegard's vision of Sapienta, Divine Wisdom

My final revision of my new novel, ILLUMINATIONS: A NOVEL OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN, are complete. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish the novel in November 2012, just in time for the next US presidential election. HILDEGARD FOR PRESIDENT, PLZ!!!

I've been working on this novel since 2008 and it feels wonderful to finally bring my homage to this very complex and inspiring woman to fruition.

Here's a report about my 2009 pilgrimage to Bingen and Disibodenberg in Germany.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Benedictine abbess and polymath, composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, natural science, medicine, and human sexuality—a prodigious intellectual outpouring that put many of her male contemporaries to shame. A mystic and visionary, her prophecies earned her the title Sibyl of the Rhine. An outspoken critic of political and ecclesiastical corruption, she courted controversy and nearly died an excommunicant. Her courage and originality of thought continue to inspire people today.

My novel ILLUMINATIONS reveals the unforgettable story of how Hildegard triumphed against impossible odds to become the greatest woman of her age.

In 1106, eight-year-old Hildegard is offered as a tithe to the Church and bricked into an anchorage with the disturbed Jutta von Sponheim, only fourteen herself. Rejecting Jutta’s masochistic piety, Hildegard’s secret visions comfort her with a far more nurturing face of the divine. She finds an ally in the young monk Volmar who smuggles her books that feed her bottomless hunger for learning.

Jutta’s saintly reputation attracts a following of child dedicants, but her extreme asceticism leads to her premature death. Now thirty-eight, Hildegard must find a way to liberate her sisters from the soul-destroying anchorage. Meanwhile her visions threaten to overwhelm her. Seized by a violent awakening, she must shatter the silence and speak of her revelations of the Living Light. Her abbot, determined to suppress this rebel nun, charges her with heresy.

Hildegard must make the gamble of a lifetime, putting her very life on the line to blaze the trail that will lead her sisters to a free and dignified existence. But she will pay the highest price for her independence of mind. Combining fiction, history, and Hildegardian philosophy, ILLUMINATIONS is my ecstatic homage to a woman of faith and power—a visionary in every sense of the word.

Here are some of the early blurbs we received. My unending gratitude goes out to these wonderful authors for their support and enthusiasm:

“I love Mary Sharratt. The grace of her writing and the grace of her subject combine seamlessly in this wonderful novel about the amazing, too-little-known saint, Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic and visionary. Sharratt captures both the pain and the beauty such gifts bring, as well as bringing to life a time of vast sins and vast redemptions.”

Karleen Koen, author of Before Versailles and the best-selling Through a Glass Darkly

“I loved Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill, but she has outdone herself with Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen. She brings one of the most famous and enigmatic women of the Middle Ages to vibrant life in this tour de force, which will captivate the reader from the very first page.”

Sharon Kay Penman, New York Times bestselling author of Time and Chance

“There is ecstasy in the writing of this redemptive novel of a 12th century woman who found a world of cruelty and filled it with beauty, a powerless woman who discovered her own power and led other women to find their own. Illuminations is a radiantly beautiful book. Readers will long remember Hildegard and the gifts she left us.”

Stephanie Cowell, author of Marrying Mozart, Claude & Camille: a >novel of Monet and The Physician of London (American Book Award)

“With elegance and sensitivity, Mary Sharratt rescues Hildegard Von Bingen from the obscurity of legend, bringing to life the flesh-and-blood woman in all her conflict, faith, and unwavering tenacity. Illuminations is an astonishing revelation of a visionary leader willing to sacrifice everything to defend her beliefs in a dangerous time of oppression.”

C.W. Gortner, author of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici

“An enchanting beginning to the story of the perennially fascinating 12th century mystic, Hildegard of Bingen. It is easy to paint a picture of a saint from the outside but much more difficult to show them from the inside. Mary Sharratt has undertaken this with sensitivity and grace.”

Margaret George, author of Elizabeth I and Mary Called Magdalene

The Pendle Witches and Their Magic, Part Two

2011-11-15T03:22:00.000-08:00

Blacko Tower, a Victorian folly (ca 1890) near Malkin Tower Farm, Lancashire

The crimes of which Mother Demdike and her fellow witches were accused dated back years before the 1612 trial. The trial itself might have never happened had it not been for King James I’s obsession with the occult. Until his reign, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England compared with Scotland and Continental Europe. But James’s book Daemonologie presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. Shakespeare wrote his play Macbeth, which presents the first depiction of a witches’ coven in English drama, in James I’s honour.

To curry favour with his monarch, Lancashire magistrate Roger Nowell of Read Hall arrested and prosecuted no fewer than twelve individuals from the Pendle region and even went to the far fetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. Two decades before the more famous Matthew Hopkins began his witch-hunting career in East Anglia, Roger Nowell had set himself up as witchfinder general of Lancashire.

What do we actually know about Mother Demdike? At the time of her trial she appears as a widow and matriarch, living in a place called Malkin Tower with her widowed daughter Elizabeth Device, and her three grandchildren, James, Alizon, and Jennet. Her clan was very poor and supported themselves by a combination of begging and by the family business of cunning craft. The trial transcripts mention that local farmer John Nutter of Bull Hole Farm near Newchurch hired Demdike to bless his sick cattle. Interestingly John Nutter chose not to testify against her family in the trial.

Demdike’s family at Malkin Tower had a powerful rival in the form of Chattox, another widow and charmer, who lived a few miles away at West Close near Fence. Chattox allegedly bewitched to death her landlord’s son, Robert Nutter of Greenhead, for attempting to rape her daughter, Anne Redfearne. For social historians it’s interesting to see how having a fearsome reputation as a cunning woman could be the only true power a poor woman could hope to wield.

Unfortunately this could also backfire as it did with Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon Device, who exchanged angry words with a pedlar outside Colne in March, 1612. Moments later the pedlar collapsed and suddenly went stiff and lame on one half of his body and lost the power of speech. Today we would clearly recognise this as a stroke. But the pedlar and several witnesses were convinced that Alizon had lamed her victim with witchcraft. Even she seemed to believe this herself, immediately falling to her knees and begging his forgiveness. This unfortunate event triggered the arrest of Alizon and her grandmother. Alizon wasted no time in implicating Chattox, her grandmother’s rival, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redfearne.

The four accused witches were interrogated by Roger Nowell, and then force-marched to Lancaster Castle, walking over fells and moorland. Both Demdike and Chattox, whose real name was Anne Whittle, were frail and elderly. It was amazing they survived the journey. In Lancaster they were handed over to the sadistic Thomas Covell, the gaoler who reputedly slashed the ears off Edward Kelly, friend of John Dee, when he was arrested on the charge of forgery. The women were chained to a ring in the floor in the bottom of the Well Tower. Although torture was officially forbidden in England, gaolers were allowed to starve and beat their prisoners at will. Being chained to a ring in the floor and kept in constant darkness would certainly feel like torture for those who had to endure it.

On Good Friday following the arrests, worried family and friends met at Malkin Tower to discuss what they would do in regard to this tragic situation. Constable John Hargreaves came to write down the names of everyone present and later Roger Nowell made further arrests, accusing these people of convening at Malkin Tower on Good Friday for a witches’ sabbat, something he would have read about in Daemonologie. The arrests didn’t stop until he had the mythical thirteen to make up the alleged coven. Twelve were kept at Lancaster and one, Jennet Preston who lived over the county line in Gisburn, Yorkshire, was sent to York. Apart from Chattox and Demdike and their immediate families, none of these newly arrested people had previous reputations as cunning folk. It seemed they were just concerned friends and neighbours who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kept in such horrible conditions, Demdike died in prison before she came to trial, thus cheating the hangman. The others experienced a different fate.

The first to be arrested, Alizon was the last to be tried at Lancaster in August, 1612. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged for witchcraft are a moving tribute to her grandmother’s power as a healer. Roger Nowell, the prosecutor, brought John Law, the pedlar she had allegedly lamed, before her. Again Alizon begged the man’s forgiveness for her perceived crime against him. John Law, in return, said that if she had the power to lame him, she must also have the power to heal him. Alizon regrettably told him that she wasn’t able to, but if her grandmother, Old Demdike had lived, she could and would have healed him.

Mother Demdike is dead but not forgotten. By the mid-17th century, Demdike’s name became a local byword for witch, according to John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folklore. In 1627, only fifteen years after the Pendle Witch Trial, a woman named Dorothy Shaw of Skippool, Lancashire, was accused by her neighbour of being a “witch and a Demdyke.”

History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. Long after her demise, Mother Demdike and her fellow Pendle Witches endure, their story and spirit woven into the living landscape, its weft and warp, like the stones and the streams that cut across the moors. Enthralled by their true history, I wrote my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, dedicated to their memory. Other books have been written about the Pendle Witches, but mine turns the tables, telling the story from Demdike and Alizon Device’s point of view. I longed to give these women what their world denied them—their own voice. Their voices deserve to finally be heard.

Sources:

Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum)
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale)
Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy (John Murray)
John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folklore (Kessinger Publishing)
King James I, Daemonologie, available online
Jonathan Lumby, The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Carnegie)
Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, available online
Edgar Peel and Pat Southern, The Trials of the Lancashire Witches (Nelson)
Robert Poole, ed., The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester University Press)
Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, available online
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin)
John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (Ams Pr Inc)
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press)
Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee (Flamingo)

The Pendle Witches and Their Magic, Part 1

2011-10-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he pays particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts describes her:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Quite impressive for an eighty-year-old lady! In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture to extract witchcraft confessions. Thus the trial transcripts supposedly reveal Elizabeth Southerns’s voluntary confession, although her words might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What’s interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a healer and magical practitioner. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb, at the stone quarry near Newchurch in Pendle. He appeared to her at daylight gate—twilight in the local dialect—in the form of beautiful young man, his coat half black and half brown, and he promised to teach her all she needed to know about magic.

Tibb was not the “devil in disguise.” The devil, as such, appeared to be a minor figure in British witchcraft. It was the familiar spirit who took centre stage: this was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form, as Emma Wilby explains in her excellent scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Mother Demdike describes Tibb appearing to her at different times in human form or in animal form. He could take the shape of a hare, a black cat, or a brown dog. It appeared that in traditional English folk magic, no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their spirit familiar—they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Belief in magic and the spirit world was absolutely mainstream in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in spells and witchcraft—rich and educated people believed in magic just as strongly. Dr. John Dee, conjuror to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician and cartographer and also an alchemist and ceremonial magician. In Dee’s England, more people relied on cunning folk for healing than on physicians. As Owen Davies explains in his book, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, cunning men and women used charms to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was technically illegal—sorcery was a hanging offence—but few were arrested for it as the demand for their services was so great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury—your local village healer with her herbs and charms was far less likely to kill you.

In this period there were magical practitioners in every community. Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches. But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods can turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. This is what happened to 16th century Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop of Edinburgh, cited by Emma Wilby in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Dunlop was burned as a witch in 1576 after her “white magic” offended the wrong person. Ultimately the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder. If your neighbours turned against you and decided you were a witch, you were doomed.

Although King James I, author of the witch-hunting handbook Daemonologie, believed that witches had made a pact with the devil, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that witches or cunning folk took part in any diabolical cult. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, tried to prove that alleged witches were part of a Pagan religion that somehow survived for centuries after the Christian conversion. Most modern academics have rejected Murray’s hypothesis as unlikely. Indeed, lingering belief in an organised Pagan religion is very difficult to substantiate. So what did cunning folk like Old Demdike believe in?

Some of her family’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts and they reveal absolutely no evidence of devil worship, but instead use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, cited by the prosecution as evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text, in places, is very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm which Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

It appears that Mother Demdike was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been commonplace before the Reformation. The pre-Reformation Church embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of the wells and fields, may indeed have Pagan origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is very hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of Pagan belief, which had become so tightly interwoven.

Unfortunately Mother Demdike had the misfortune to live in a place and time when Catholicism was conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, one of the most enlightened men of his age, believed the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In a 1645 pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: "No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists." Keith Thomas’s social history Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

However, it would be an oversimplification to state that Mother Demdike was merely a misunderstood practitioner of Catholic folk magic. Her description of her decades-long partnership with her spirit Tibb seems to draw on something outside the boundaries of Christianity.

Although it is difficult to prove that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped Pagan deities, the so-called fairy faith, the enduring belief in fairies and elves, is well documented. In his 1677 book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. The Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop mentioned earlier, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit was a fairy man sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame.

All Hallows Eve in Old Lancashire

2011-10-16T03:11:00.001-07:00

Come Halloween, the popular imagination turns to witches. Especially in Pendle Witch Country, the rugged Pennine landscape surrounding Pendle Hill, once home to twelve individuals arrested for witchcraft in 1612. The most notorious was Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike, cunning woman of long-standing repute and the heroine of my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill.

How did these historical cunning folk celebrate All Hallows Eve?

All Hallows has its roots in the ancient feast of Samhain, which marked the end of the pastoral year and was considered particularly numinous, a time when the faery folk and the spirits of the dead roved abroad. Many of these beliefs were preserved in the Christian feast of All Hallows, which had developed into a spectacular affair by the late Middle Ages, with church bells ringing all night to comfort the souls thought to be in purgatory. Did this custom have its origin in much older rites of ancestor veneration? This threshold feast opening the season of cold and darkness allowed people to confront their deepest fears—that of death and what lay beyond. And their deepest longings—reunion with their cherished departed.

After the Reformation, these old Catholic rites were outlawed, resulting in one of the longest struggles waged by Protestant reformers against any of the traditional ecclesiastical rituals. Lay people stubbornly continued to hold vigils for their dead—a rite that could be performed without a priest and in cover of darkness. Until the early 19th century in the Lancashire parish of Whalley, some families still gathered at midnight upon All Hallows Eve. One person held a large bunch of burning straw on a pitchfork while the others knelt in a circle and prayed for their beloved dead until the flames burned out.

Long after the Reformation, people persisted in giving round oatcakes, called Soul-Mass Cakes to soulers, the poor who went door to door singing Souling Songs as they begged for alms on the Feast of All Souls, November 2. Each cake eaten represented a soul released from purgatory, a mystical communion with the dead.

In Glossographia, published in 1674, Thomas Blount writes:

All Souls Day, November 2d: the custom of Soul Mass cakes, which are a kind of oat cakes, that some of the richer sorts in Lancashire and Herefordshire (among the Papists there) use still to give the poor upon this day; and they, in retribution of their charity, hold themselves obliged to say this old couplet:

God have your soul,
Bones and all.

Other All Hallows folk rituals invoked the power of fire to purify and ward. In the Fylde district of Lancashire, farmers circled their fields with burning straw on the point of a fork to protect the coming crop from noxious weeds.

Fire was used to protect people from perceived evil spirits active on this night. At Longridge Fell in Lancashire, very close to Pendle Hill, the custom of ‘lating’ or hindering witches endured until the early 19th century. On All Hallows Eve, people walked up hillsides between 11 pm and midnight. Each person carried a lighted candle and if the flame went out, it was taken as a sign that an attack by a witch was impending and that the appropriate charms must be employed to protect oneself.

What do these old traditions mean to us today?

All Hallows is not just a date on the calendar, but the entire tide, or season, in which we celebrate ancestral memory and commemorate our dead. This is also the season of storytelling, of re-membering the past. The veil between the seen and unseen grows thin and we may dream true.

Wishing a blessed All Hallows Tide to all!

Source: Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain

Links:

Soul Cake Recipes

Souling Songs

Excerpt from Daughters of the Witching Hill

At Hallowtide, Liza insisted on walking up Blacko Hill, as we’d always done, for our midnight vigil on the Eve of All Saints. Under cover of darkness we crept forth with me carrying the lantern to light our way and John following with a pitchfork crowned in a great bundle of straw.

Once we reached the hilltop, after a furtive look round to make sure no one else was about, John lit the straw with the lantern flame so that the straw atop the pitchfork blazed like a torch. With him to hold the fork upright and keep an eye out for intruders, Liza and I knelt to pray for our dead. In the old days, we’d held this vigil in the church, the whole parish praying together, the darkened chapel bright as day with the many candles glowing on the saints’ altars. Now we were left to do this in secret, stealing away like criminals in the night, as though it were something shameful to hail our deceased. I prayed for my mam and grand-dad, calling out to their souls till I felt them both step through the veil to bring me comfort.

In my heart of hearts, I did not believe my loved ones were in purgatory waiting, by and by, to be let into heaven. There was no air of suffering or torment about them, only the joy of reunion. My mam, young and pretty, worked in her herb garden. She hummed a lilting tune whilst her earth-stained fingers pointed out to me the plants I must use to ease Liza’s birth pangs. Grand-Dad whispered his old charms to bless me and Liza and John.

A long spell I knelt there, held in the embrace of my beloved dead, till the straw on the pitchfork burned itself out, falling in embers and ash to the ground. Our John helped my pregnant daughter to her feet, then we made our way home through the night that no longer seemed so dark.

Witch Persecutions, Women, and Social Change--Germany: 1560 - 1660

2011-08-27T02:36:00.000-07:00

Burning witches, 1555.

PART THREE

(Read Part One and Part Two.)

Major witch hunting panics arose in the 1560s throughout Europe and were especially severe in the German Southwest. Who were the victims of this mass hysteria? Even though witches were believed to come from all social classes, the trials focused on poor, middle-aged or older women (Merchant 138). Throughout Europe, midwives and healers were particularly suspect. These "wise women" who healed with herbs were held especially suspect, as they were often older women who had astonishing empirical knowlege, which their accusers traced back to the devil (Rauer 121). Many other women were targeted, as well. Outsiders and women on the fringe of society were especially vulnerable. Fifty-five of the seventy-one accused witches executed in Rottenweil, Germany, after 1600 came from outside the community, and their execution reflected both xenophobia and "a hatred of the unusual and rootless" (Midelfort 95-96). The blatant persecution of the poor prompted one accused witch in Wiesenstieg to ask her inquisitor why rich women were never arrested (Ibid. 169). Thus, though the witch panics took different forms at different times and places, they never lost their essential character--that of a campaign of terror against lower class women in search of substinence.

The question we must ask when presented with this information is why poor women and why this period in history? To invoke such massive hunts, trials, and executions, these women must have been perceived as a major threat. Whose interests did their annihalation serve? Here, I must agree with Carolyn Merchant that the control and maintenance of the social order and women's place within it was one major underlying motivation for the witch trials (Merchant 138).

The women most likely to be accused and executed were those most visibly discontent with their socio-economic condition. They were the strident women who complained about their situations and would not conform to the increasingly restrictive sphere of femininity of 16th and 17th century Europe. Sharp-tongued mothers-in-law were accused of witchcraft by their own families. Feisty spinsters or widows who refused to remarry were frequent targets of witchcraft allegations. Midelfort cites an example of a widow accused of witchcraft being released on the condition that she live with her son-in-law and remain under his control (Midelfort 184). Another common trait found among accused witches in Southwest Germany was a melancholic dissatisfaction with marriage and conventional religion (Ibid. 92) Begging and complaining about poverty were behaviors that led very frequently to accusations (Rauer 121). In 1505, Heinrich Deichsler reports in his famous Nuernberger Chronik that Barbara, a woman from Schwabach near Nuremburg, was burned as a witch after she had borrowed money from several neighbors and failed to pay them back (Schneider 18-19). The primary personality traits of witches outlined by Kramer and Sprenger in their witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum were infidelity, ambition, and lust--traits that may not have been so noteworthy a few centuries before (Malleus 47). All in all, witch persecutions appeared to focus specifically on headstrong and insubordinate women.

Once a woman was labeled a witch, almost anyone could do anything to her without fear or punishment. Legally she was damned and without rights. Even before she was arrested and taken to trial, her neighbors were allowed to take justice in their own hands. Indeed, neighbors took the lead in making witchcraft accusations--it was quite common to simply call someone one disliked a witch (Midelfort 115).

Once a witch was brought to trial, she was doomed. In Germany, torture was part of the established trial procedure and could legally last for days on end. German prison guards sometimes admitted to committing rape, extortion, and blackmail on prisoners, as well (Midelfort 107). Suspects were tortured until they confessed their participation in evil magic and sex with the devil, and named the other women they had seen at the supposed witches' sabbat. Many trial officials had lists of questions to elicit responses which would conform to established beliefs about witchcraft. Dr. Carl Ellwangen began his inquisitions by asking the accused to recite the Lord's Prayer. Then he immediately asked them who seduced them into witchcraft, how the seduction occured, why they gave in, what it was like to have sex with the devil, and so on (Ibid. 105). Torture could extract almost any confession from anyone. "When suspects proved stubborn, they were often tortured to death" (Ibid. 149). Another common trial procedure reveals the inquisitors' obsession with sexuality. Women were stripped, shaved, and pricked with bodkins all over their bodies in search of supposed witch marks, or searched for signs of intercourse with the devil. In Germany, it was not uncommon for an accused witch's property to be confiscated, with Church and secular authorities receiving their share (Ibid. 178). Because accused witches were tortured until they gave the names of others they had allegedly seen at the sabbat, the more intensely witchcraft was persecuted, and the more numerous the alleged witches became. Thus, the trials and accusations escalated (Trevor-Roper 97).

On a social level, witch persecutions could not only be used to weed out the most troublesome of the undeserving poor, but they also produced a general atmosphere of paranoia and disunity among the population. Even those who consulted accused witches for healing or other services risked becomong suspect (Larner 9). The accused witch served as an example to other women as to how they would be treated if they did as she did. This, of course, helped enforce new moral and religious codes (Ibid 102). For this reason, witch hunting can be viewed as one of the most public and effective forms of social control to evolve in Early Modern Europe (Ibid 64). Witches made convenient community scapegoats for communal misfortunes such as plagues and famines (Midelfort 121). The peasant population focused their anger and resentment at members of their own peer group rather than the ruling classes who exploited them. Thus, the witch persecutions undermined solidarity and cooperation among peasants and were instrumental in curbing rebellion. In Southwest Germany, the great witch trials began not long after the Peasant Wars.

Why were such extreme measures of social control necessary? What was taking place in society at large that caused poor and elderly women to be viewed as such an enormous threat?

The period of 1560 to 1660 was one of drastic economic, religious, and social change. This period witnessed the dissolution of the last remnants of a feudal agrarian and domestic economy in favor of a capitalist market economy (Hobsbawn 5). But for this new order to succeed, the old feudal tradition, in which peasants controlled production and were guaranteed subsistence, had to die. This transition was particularly hard on women. Formerly, in the domestic economy, the workplace was the home and women were active in cottage industries. However, the transition to working in outside the home made participation in this economy more and more difficult for women. Over this period, women were forced out of the guilds and the professions in which they could maintain economic independence. Increasingly they were forced into a narrowly domestic role. By the 16th century, the only opportunities for women to earn a living were in menial servant and labor occupations (Hoher 17). Often this sort of work was so low paid that women wandered penniless and homeless in search of better conditions (Ibid. 18).

Furthermore, by this time, even such traditionally feminine occupations such as healing and midwifery were being taken over by men. In the Renaissance, the trend among the wealthy was to have a university-educated physician at their disposal. After the advent of Paracelsus, the famous medical doctor, only men were officially allowed to practice medicine. Paracelsus himself explained that God granted the educated physician all the arts and faculties most beneficial to serve others and that the doctor must be a true man and not some ignorant old woman (Rauer 109, paraphrasing "So spricht Paracelsus"). Male medical practitioners went so far as to push women out of midwifery. Eucharius Rosslin, author of the foremost "midwife" book, Der Schwangererfrawen und Hebammen rossgarten complained that midwives' supposed incompetence, laziness, and lack of education resulted in high infant mortality. He even denounces them as murderers:

Ich meyn die Hebammen alle sampt
Die also gar kein Wissen handt.
Dazu durch yr Hynlessigkeit
Kind verderben weit und breit.
Und handt so schlechten Fleiss gethon
Dass sie mit Ampt eyn Mort begon. (Ibid 123)

Women in the Renaissance not only faced an economic crisis. Their sexual and social freedom was being severely restricted, as well. Unlike the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Period offered practically no alternative to the wife-mother role. By the 16th century, the beguinages were gone. Women hermits and vagabonds risked being accused of witchcraft. Due to the Reformation and Counter Reformation, even convents had grown smaller in number and the nuns who lived there experienced increasing restrictions on their mobility and contact to the outside world. At the same time, both Catholic and Protestant Churches were tightening moral strictures to produce a puritanism unheard of in the agrarian society of the medieval period. Church officials on both sides of the faultline of the Reformation wanted to have iron control over the moral behavior of the populace. Traditional seasonal festivals, hedonism, and sexual licentiousness all smacked of ungodliness and were no longer to be tolerated. Control over female sexuality was especially emphasized. Religious offences were now punished in secular courts and in public shaming rituals. For this was a period of great religious insecurity. The cut-throat competition between Catholics and Protestants resulted in sectarian and ideological warfare, with each side trying to terrorize the local population into submitting to their orthodoxies (Reuther 104). The witch trials' obsession with female sexuality reflects this puritanical attempt to control women's lives. Tightening religious strictures and the new economic system complemented each other--they both attempted to bring the rebellious, hedonistic peasant population under control of Church and secular authorities. The witch persecutions were symptomatic of a new totalitarianism (Rauer 123).

The ideal housewife, circa 1525, by Anton Woensam.

Sources:

Hobsbawn, E.J., "The Crisis in the Seventeenth Century," Crisis in Europe 1560-1660, Trevor Aston, ed., Routledge, London, 1983.

Hoher, Frederike, "Hexe, Maria, und Hausmutter--zur Geschichte der Weiblichkeit im Spaetmittelalter," Frauen in der Geschichte, Vol. III, Kuhn/Rusen, eds, Paedagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Duesseldorf, 1983.

Institorus, Henricus, Malleus Maleficarum, Benjamin Blom, Inc., New York, 1970.

Larner, Christine, Enemies of God, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1981.

Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Haeprer & Row, San Francisco, 1979.

Midelfort, Erik, H.C., Witch Hunting in Southwest Germany 1562-1684: The Social Foundations, Stanford, 1972.

Rauer, Brigitte, "Hexenwahn--Frauenverfolgung zu Beginn der Neuzeit," Frauen in der Geschichte, Vol. II, Kuhn/Rusen, eds., Paedagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, 1982.

Schneider, Joachim, Heinrich Deichsler und die Nuernberger Chronik des 15. Jahrhunderts, Wissenliteratur im Mittelalter, Vol. 5, Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1991.

Trevor-Roper, H.R., The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Harper & Row, New York, 1969.

Women & the Crusades: guest post by Nan Hawthorne

2011-08-04T03:50:00.000-07:00

Today's guest post is by Nan Hawthorne, whose new novel Beloved Pilgrim explores the Crusade of 1101 from the perspective of a woman who went off to fight.

During my own research of Hildegard von Bingen, I uncovered this short description of female crusaders from the Disibodenberg Chronicles, written by the monks of the abbey of Disibodenberg where Hildegard lived from the age of eight as a child anchorite:

Not only men and boys, but many women also took part in this journey. Indeed females went forth on this venture dressed as men and marched in armour . . .

--From the Disibodenberg Chronicles, as cited by Fiona Maddocks in her book, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age.

Although the fiction might be romantic and compelling, we can't neglect certain historical realities. Muslims and Jews regarded these "Holy Wars" as genocide. Indeed, in Rhineland German cities and towns such as Mainz and Bacharach, many Jewish people met their deaths in the tumult of the crusading fervour.

The Crusade of 1101 and Beloved Pilgrim by Nan Hawthorne

The initial research I did to write, Beloved Pilgrim, had everything to do with my choice of the dates and events portrayed. Though many of us are familiar with battles and figures from the Crusades, the Crusade of 1101, though obscure by comparison, proved to be tailor-made for a novel. The actual event took place over only a few months and in itself was classic plotting, with a dramatic beginning, several setbacks, conflict not only between the crusaders and Turks but also between the Christian leaders who made such a mess of things, and the devastating conclusion. Reading more about the crusade, usually considered an extension of the First Crusade, I found that the context was ideal for character development and thematic requirements I already had in mind.

The chroniclers of this crusade did not experience it themselves, but scholar Steven Runciman was able to put together what is as close to a definitive history as possible. His work, A History of the Crusades: Volumes 1-3, was my and the rest of the world’s primary source, along with the able help of Jack Graham, a medieval warfare enthusiast who helped me choreograph battle scenes and fixed some apparent inconsistencies in Runciman’s account. That Graham had lived in Turkey was also very helpful.

Some may question whether a woman like Elisabeth could have fought as a knight. I was not able to find evidence of women who fought thus in the Crusades, but knowing about Joan of Arc, Boudica and Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, so I feel justified in portraying her as such. Her lesbianism is pure speculation.

One of the mysteries that came out of the Crusade of 1101 was what happened to Ida, Margravine of Austria, who disappeared and was never found again. The only theory extant, that she was captured and became the mother of a great Saracen leader, is easily dismissed as the man was already born when she arrived in Byzantium. This mystery provided me the opportunity as an author to suggest what may have happened to her and make it part of the story and my protagonist’s journey.

I firmly believe that as an author of historical fiction I have a responsibility to make the setting, characters and events as authentic as possible, but I also believe that nothing can substitute for good storytelling. Fiction and history texts are not the same. It is the function and beauty of historical fiction to bring the reader into a historical context in such a way that he or she can experience it as close to first hand as possible. I therefore feel free to insert myself, my ability to speculate and extrapolate, making, as far as I see it something even more authentic than a straight retelling of historical record. The latter cannot even come close to telling the true story, if only because the historian focuses on primarily the people and places at the core of the events. A historical novelist can move the focus off these and onto the rest of the world and suggest how people at the time may have seen, reacted to and drawn their own conclusions.

Beyond the Marquee: Toward a Common History

2011-06-05T03:57:00.001-07:00

This article of mine was originally published in the February 2011 issue of Historical Novels Review.

Come and visit our panel "Are Marquee Names Really Necessary" with star authors Margaret George, C.W. Gortner, Susanne Dunlap, and Vanitha Sankaran at the 2011 Historical Novel Society North American Conference in San Diego, on Saturday, June 18.

Recorded history is wrong. It’s wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it.
These are the words of the late, great Mary Lee Settle, author of the classic Beulah Land Quintet, published in the 1950’s when both academic history and most historical fiction were narrowly focused on the elite. So many people have been written out of history: not only the vast majority of women, but also people of the peasant and labouring classes, and most people of non-European ancestry. In Settle’s day, a more inclusive history seemed a far off dream.

“There’s a revolution going on out there!”

Sarah Dunant, acclaimed author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, remembers this time. Speaking at the Bluecoat School in Liverpool in May 2010, Dunant described how she first fell in love with historical fiction when she was a twelve-year-old in postwar Britain, which she remembers as “a grey, colourless, bleak place” where nobody wanted to talk about the war. On the brink of adolescence, she found a wonderful escape in Jean Plaidy’s novels of the crowned heads of Europe. These books not only opened up another world that was colourful and glamorous but they inspired Dunant’s lifelong love affair with history. She went on to study history at Cambridge. “The history I learned,” she recalls, “was the history of great battles, great empires, great men.”

But what inspired Dunant to become a historical novelist were the sweeping developments in academic history that occurred after she left Cambridge in 1972. This new history embraced people who did not belong to the elite. She cites Joan Kelly-Gadol’s 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” as one of the turning points in the development of how we look at history.

Sarah Dunant is not only a champion of a more inclusive, non-elitist historical fiction—she also became an international bestseller by writing about people on the margins of history. Her most recent novel, Sacred Hearts, explores the secret world of Benedictine nuns in 1570 Ferrara, Italy—a cloistered “republic of women” where each choir sister had a voice and a vote in the daily chapter house meeting.

“Modern historians,” Dunant explains, “know that there is a multiplicity of history—there is more than one history, one fact. The history I’m using has been hard won over the past twenty to thirty years.” And this history allowed her to write novels about a past that simply wasn’t regarded as history even thirty years ago. For Sacred Hearts, she has drawn on two generations of young historians who examined court records of nuns who got into trouble.

Similarly, I could not have written my most recent novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, which is based on the true story of the Pendle Witches of 1612, without the drawing on groundbreaking social histories, such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic; landmark works on Reformation Studies, like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England; as well as recent studies on historical cunning folk.

Is the tide, then, changing? Will this new history open the door to a Renaissance in the historical novel? Will more and more authors draw on this wider window into ordinary people’s lives instead of rehashing the same old tired tales of Tudor royalty? Dunant believes that historical novelists possess every potential to be on the cutting edge of bringing this new history in an accessible form to a modern audience. “Wake up, there’s a revolution going on out there in historical fiction!” Dunant told Lucinda Byatt in their May 2010 Solander interview.

Marquee names only, please

Although the world of academic history has moved on light years since the 1950s, historical fiction often appears to be stuck in a rut. In these recessionary times, an increasingly conservative publishing market urges new and established authors alike to play it safe by writing about famous historical figures, such as Tudor royalty, instead of drawing on a social history of the less privileged.

Speaking at the 2007 Historical Novel Society Conference in Albany, New York, agent Irene Goodman stressed the importance of “marquee names” in finding an audience for one’s historical fiction. In the May 2010 issue of Solander, Goodman cited author Leslie Carroll’s leap from midlist obscurity to major success with the sale of her trilogy of novels about Marie Antoinette. Goodman is not alone in stressing the importance of marquee names.

“The trend simply cannot be denied,” Bethany Latham, Managing Editor of Historical Novels Review, observes. “For better or worse, publishers seem to prefer marquee names right now. They’re the path of least resistance—easier to market since, in the mind of many publishers, celebrity protagonist equals ready-made audience. There’s even a tendency for successful authors who began differently to evolve into something that better fits the prevailing mold—witness Philippa Gregory, who started out with the Wideacre Trilogy but has ended up with the familiar big-name Tudors and Plantagenets, and will be sticking with them for the foreseeable future.”

Popular fascination with historical It Girls like Anne Boleyn helped launch the incredible resurgence in historical fiction within the past decade, most notably through Gregory’s blockbuster, The Other Boleyn Girl. Literary agent Marcy Posner, speaking at the 2010 Historical Novel Society Conference in Manchester, UK, pointed out how Gregory’s glittering evocation of the Tudor Court inspired a large group of female readers to make the leap from historical romance to mainstream historicals. It seems only natural for agents and editors to look for work that contains the same kind of hook that proved so successful for Gregory.

“My experience was that when I sent some of my work to an agent,” says Elizabeth Ashworth, author of The de Lacy Inheritance, “she thought it was an engaging story and she liked my style of writing but she didn’t think she could sell my work to a publisher because it wasn’t about a well known king or queen. When I mentioned that I was working on another novel set in the reign of Edward III, she replied that if I wrote about Edward and Piers Gaveston, she might be interested. But that story has been written many times before and it was another story I wanted to tell – one about Lady Mabel Bradshaw who lived at that time but is relatively unknown.”

“The marquee name, especially female, has become almost a requirement in historical fiction,” says C.W. Gortner, author of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici. “My novel, The Last Queen, languished unpublished for years, with several of my rejection letters pointing out that Juana [of Spain] was not a ‘known personage’. I persisted and eventually found success, but how many other writers give up?”

The insistence on marquee names was why author Jeri Westerson says she switched to writing historical mysteries. “I preferred to write about the everyman in an historical setting, but year after year, I was told by editors that my medieval stories needed to be about royalty or other noble personages. The kind of historical I wanted to write translated much better to the mystery genre. So now I write medieval mysteries (after some eleven years of peddling historical manuscripts and not selling them).” Her fourth Crispin Guest Medieval Noir, Troubled Bones, will be released in Fall 2011. However, other historical mystery writers embrace the marquee name trend by choosing a well known figure such as Elizabeth I or Oscar Wilde as their sleuth.

Susanne Dunlap, author of Liszt’s Kiss and The Musician’s Daughter, adds that in Young Adult Fiction, the pressure is to write “something that fits into the high school curriculum,” which may well involve including famous personalities.

The bias can sometimes be found among HNS members themselves. Historical Novels Review Book Review Editor Sarah Johnson has noticed that reviewers tend to clamour for books about big names while novels about less familiar characters and settings can be harder to place.

Not even the most elite literary circles are immune to this trend. Hilary Mantel’s Booker Award winning masterpiece Wolf Hall is set in Henry VIII’s court.

A lack of diversity in the genre?

So does this push to write about marquee names help or hinder historical fiction?

“This is the backwash of celebrity culture,” Dunant states, “and our greed for sensation and scandal. People read about Anne Boleyn when they tire of reading about Paris Hilton. We’ve gone back to kings and queens, a celebrity history, because we’ve squeezed Paris Hilton dry.”

Must we all write like latter day Jean Plaidys and Georgette Heyers in order to meet our publishers’ sales expectations? Bethany Latham laments to think that in today’s climate, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the bestselling historical novel of all time, might not be published because Scarlet O’Hara is a nobody.

Alison Weir, speaking at the 2010 HNS Conference in Manchester, presents a different viewpoint, arguing that her novels on figures such as Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine are a legitimate way of reclaiming women’s history, even though they are focused on elite women. As Keynote Speaker at the conference, Weir explained how she pitched a nonfiction biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine some years ago only to be told that not enough material existed on her to make her a worthy subject.

“I think many readers gravitate toward the familiar,” Sarah Johnson observes, “and historical fiction readers in particular often choose novels that help them gain insight into a real-life character’s mindset or behavior. In that sense, I can see why marquee names are so popular, and why authors are being encouraged to choose them as subjects. It’s an automatic ‘hook.’”

Johnson added that the industry’s insistence on marquee names has the unfortunate drawback of creating a “lack of diversity of the genre.”

“The push for ‘big names’ is primarily about name recognition,” state N. Gemini Sasson, author of The Crown in the Heather. “The casual historical fiction reader scanning the shelves at the local Target store is more likely to linger over a name she recognizes, pick up the book and buy it, than an unknown. I do wonder though when a saturation point for some of these historical persons will be reached and the scales tip the other way.”

“If I see another book on the Tudors, I’ll scream!”

Which begs the question: are historical fiction readers beginning to reach their saturation point with historical celebrities? Eager to ape Philippa Gregory’s success, many authors have tried to follow her formula, with mixed results. How many more novels about Tudor royalty can the public bear?

“Frankly, if I see another book on the Tudors, I’ll scream,” HNS member Monica Spence admits.

“When I’m book-buying, the Not Anne Boleyn Again Syndrome periodically strikes,” Bethany Latham confesses.

Anne Gilbert says that she tends to shy away from fictional biographies. “No matter how well-written they may be,” says Gilbert, “they tend to concentrate on pretty much the same well-known historical people.”

“There are only so many ‘ultra famous’ women we can write about, whom publishers find commercial enough,” C.W. Gortner observes. “Take, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine; as fascinating as she is, how much more can be said about her without it becoming repetitious or whimsical in novelized form?”

A 2009 market research poll conducted by blogger Julianne Douglas on Writing the Renaissance indicates that only 11% of the people she surveyed buy historical fiction based on the appeal of marquee names alone. Readers want so much more out of their fiction: fascinating characters and storylines, arresting and richly realised settings.

Finding an audience

Following the Publisher's Weekly listings of best-selling historical fiction on her blog, Reading the Past, Sarah Johnson mentions Edward Rutherfurd, Lisa See, and Sandra Dallas as just a few commercially successful authors who have bucked the big name trend. Their novels reached a wide audience because they have additional hooks that attract readers, Johnson points out, such as strong book club potential, and they also appeal to many readers outside the core historical fiction audience. Bethany Latham praises Maggie O’Farrell as a successful author with a fresh, original voice, who is utterly unaffected by the celebrity trend, not to mention Kenneth Follett, whose blockbuster Fall of Giants saga depicts ordinary people against extraordinary historical backdrops.

However, HNS member Matt Phillips, who is writing a novel based on his ancestors on the Pennsylvania frontier, still feels that not enough historical fiction based on the lives of “real people” is reaching the reading public. “There are so many stories that can shed light on how the ‘average person’ lived, or might have lived, while also entertaining the reader, engaging his or her imagination and emotions authentically with the thrills and fears and hopes and challenges of living in another time. Yet relatively few such stories find their way to the shelves of our bookstores because publishers continue to emphasize the marquee names.”

What happens when new or midlist authors embrace the lives of people on the margins of history? Gabriella West’s novel Time of Grace (Wolfhound Press, 2002) is a daring work—a woman-centered look at a very male period in history, Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, and also a romance between two young women. “It was successfully published but I’m not sure it was published successfully,” West says. “It never really found its audience.”

Joyce Elson Moore’s has had a happier experience with her new novel, The Tapestry Shop, based on the life of Adam de la Halle, an obscure 13th-century musician. “His secular plays and music are still being performed,” Moore explains, “and he was one of the last and greatest of the trouveres (like troubadours in southern France). He penned the first version of the Robin Hood legend, and I felt like his story had to be told. The book is getting a lot of attention, and I think one reason is that it is different.”

Elizabeth Ashworth reports good sales on her own first novel, The de Lacy Inheritance. “I was lucky that my publisher Myrmidon Books was willing to take my novel, although the main character is a leper. It’s selling well and I think that proves the publishers wrong who maintain that readers only want to read about kings and queens.”

“Just give us variety.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure I’d be able to work with the constraints of a documented marquee name,” says Vanitha Sankaran, whose debut novel Watermark explores the life of a woman papermaker in late medieval France. “As a writer, I like the freedom of being able to create my own characters and stories while staying accurate to the era. As a reader, however, I’m interested in reading about all different t ypes of people, from the poor man trying to feed his pregnant wife to the merchant seeing his profits swallowed up by war. I wish publishers would take more risks across the whole genre and not focus on any time, place, or biographical person, but just give us variety.”

Sarah Johnson agrees that “those who stick narrowly to celebrity characters are missing out on some wonderful stories! In particular, the Editors’ Choice selections in Historical Novels Review demonstrate that historical fiction readers’ most highly recommended books don’t follow trends or fit into neat categories.”

N. Gemini Sasson sums it up beautifully: “There are less well known historical figures that have stories worth telling, every bit as compelling and dramatic as those whose stories have been told a hundred ways already. Sharing their lives would do nothing but enrich our view of the past.”

Perhaps we are indeed ready for a revolution in historical fiction.

“Time to Change the Marquee” by Julianne Douglas

“Bestselling Historical Novels of 2009” by Sarah Johnson

Mary Frith: the Original Roaring Girl

2011-04-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Behind Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s sparkling stage comedy, The Roaring Girl, (ca 1607-1610), was a real woman, the notorious Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse—a cross-dressing, hard-drinking pickpocket, fence, and Queen of Misrule.

The vintner bet Moll £20 that she would not ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch astraddle on horseback, in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs. The hoyden took him up in a moment, and added of her own devilry a trumpet and banner. She set out from Charing Cross bravely enough, and a trumpeter being an unwonted spectacle, the eyes of all the town were clapped upon her. Yet none knew her until she reached Bishopsgate, where an orange-wench set up the cry, `Moll Cutpurse on horseback!' Instantly the cavalier was surrounded by a noisy mob. Some would have torn her from the saddle for an imagined insult upon womanhood, others, more wisely minded, laughed at the prank with good-humoured merriment. Every minute the throng grew denser, and it had fared hardly with roystering Moll, had not a wedding and the arrest of a debtor presently distracted the gaping idlers. As the mob turned to gaze at the fresh wonder, she spurred her horse until she gained Newington by an unfrequented lane. There she waited until night should cover her progress to Shoreditch, and thus peacefully she returned home to lighten the vintner's pocket of twenty pounds.

-One of the many merry pranks attributed to Firth in Charles Whibley's A Book of Scoundrels.

Born in London in 1584 to a shoemaker and a housewife, Frith was an uncompromising tomboy who disdained feminine clothing. Instead she sported a doublet and men’s breeches. She smoked a pipe and swore like a sailor. The original Jacobean Roaring Girl, she ran with a rough crowd, aping the lifestyle of the traditional Roaring Boys, young men who caroused in taverns before going on the streets to brawl and engage in petty crime. In 1600, at the age of sixteen, she was first indicted for thievery, stealing 2s, 11d.

By 1610, her reputation had inspired not only Middleton and Dekker’s famous play but many other works, including John Day’s 1610 drama, The Madde Pranckes of Mery Mall of the Bankside. These works sensationalised her scandalous behaviour. Men regarded women who habitually cross-dressed as sexually riotous and out of control. Yet Frith herself claimed to be uninterested in sex.

She did, however, revel in her notoriety. In 1611 she performed at the Fortune Theatre in an age where women on the stage were unheard of and female parts in plays were performed by boys in women’s clothing. Frith, as always, appeared in breeches and regaled her audience by singing bawdy songs while playing the lute. Later in that same year, she was arrested for indecent dress and accused of prostitution.

In February 1612, Frith was made to do penance for her evil living at Saint Paul’s Cross, an open air preaching cross on the grounds of the old Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. Before the crowd she wept copiously and appeared very penitent indeed, although John Chamberlain later observed in a letter that he thought she only wept on account of being “maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled three-quarters of sack.”

In 1614, Frith wed Lewknor Markham in what appeared to a marriage of convenience, but she gave no signs of settling down. By the 1620s, she was working as a fence and a pimp, procuring both young women for her male clients and strapping young men to service middle class wives.

In 1644, records show that she was released from Bethlem Hospital after being cured of insanity.

An apocryphal tale goes so far as to claim that during the English Civil War, she robbed and shot General Fairfax, then escaped the gallows by way of a 2000 pound bribe.

However, her actual recorded death seems the least exciting episode in her long and colourful life. In July 1659, she died of dropsy in Fleet Street, London.

Read her fabulously embroidered biography in Charles Whibley’s A Book of Scoundrels.

A Short History of Saint Valentine's Day

2011-02-10T11:15:00.000-08:00

It was the practice in ancient Rome, during a great part of the month of February, to celebrate the Lupercalia, which were feasts in honour of Pan and Juno. whence the latter deity was named Februata, Februalis, and Februlla. On this occasion, amidst a variety of ceremonies, the names of young women were put into a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. The pastors of the early Christian church, who, by every possible means, endeavoured to eradicate the vestiges of pagan superstitions, and chiefly by some commutations of their forms, substituted, in the present instance, the names of particular saints instead of those of the women: and as the festival of the Lupercalia had commenced about the middle of February, they appear to have chosen St. Valentine's Day for celebrating the new feast, because it occurred nearly at the same time.

To look and search Cupid's calendar,
And choose their choice, the great affection.

it is customary, alike for married and unmarried people, that the first person one meets in the morning, that is, if one if a man, the first woman or girl, becomes one's Valentine. He asks her name which he takes down and carries on a long strip of paper in his hat band, and in the same way the woman or girl wears his name on her bodice; but it is the practice that they meet on the evening before and choose each other for their Valentine, and, come Easter, they send each other gloves, silk stockings, or sometimes a miniature portrait, which the ladies wear to foster the friendship.

Hard hitting fiction

2011-02-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

Tired of chick lit and looking for contemporary fiction with a bit more bite to it?

Randy Susan Meyers's hard hitting novel, THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS, has just been released in paperback. This book has been getting so much acclaim, it would be a pity to miss.

Randy Susan Meyers lives in Boston with her husband. She teaches at the Grub Street Writers Center and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. The Los Angeles Times called her debut novel, The Murderer’s Daughters “a knock-out debut . . .all too believable and heartbreaking.”

Be sure to check out her website.

New Year, New Book

2011-01-22T03:44:00.001-08:00

DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL, my novel exploring the true story of the Pendle Witches of 1612, is now out in paperback.

The wild, brooding landscape of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, Northern England, my home for the past nine years, gave birth to my novel, DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL, which tells the true story of the Pendle Witches.

In 1612, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged for witchcraft, but the most notorious of the accused, Bess Southerns, aka Mother Demdike, cheated the hangman by dying in prison. This is how Thomas Potts, describes her in THE WONDERFULL DISCOVERIE OF WITCHES IN THE COUNTIE OF LANCASTER:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. She dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knowes. . . . No man escaped her or her Furies.

Other books have been written about the Pendle Witches--both nuanced and lurid. Mine is the first to tell the tale from Bess Southerns's point of view. I longed to give her what her world denied her--her own voice.

History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. Set in an era of religious intolerance, political strife, suspicion, and social inequality, Bess and her family's struggle feels more relevant than ever, especially as we approach the 400th anniversary of the Pendle Witch trials in 2012.

I hope you will be as moved by their story as I am.

Here is a short video docodrama I shot with Outsider TV about a year ago:

Read an excerpt.

Read what the critics are saying about the book.

Where to buy:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Barnes & Noble

Borders

Powells

Indiebound

The book is also available in e-book in both Kindle and Nook formats.

Bringing Light to Dark Places

2010-12-16T02:44:00.000-08:00

Warmest Midwinter Blessings to all my readers

It's all too easy to feel frazzled and stressed during this time of year when the ancient sacred significance of the season has been overshadowed by the commercialism of "Giftmas."

Midwinter is the darkest time of year, the time of the Winter Solstice, when the sun appears to stand still in the sky. Here, in the North of England, the darkness feels overwhelming. The sun does not rise until after 8:00 and sets by 3:30. By 5:00, it's pitch dark. Now imagine experiencing this before the era of electric lights and central heating.

This silent tide of year has been marked by sacred ritual from time out of mind. Modern Christmas has roots that reach back before the dawn of Christianity.

The ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia, the Festival of Saturn, with much merry-making, gift-giving, and "misrule," as the masters waited upon their slaves. People decorated their homes with greenery. Rich and poor alike joined in the feasting. In Northern Europe, Yuletide festivities marked the Solstice and the return of the light. In De temporum ratione, the Venerable Bede (673-735) wrote that the Pagan Anglo-Saxons began their year on December 25, on a feast they called Modranecht, or Mother's Night, marked by ceremonies that lasted the entire night. Mostly likely this feast was connected with the cult of the Matronae, the female ancestors.

Although there is no scriptural evidence to suggest that Jesus was born on 25 December, the early Church embraced this Solstice tide as fitting for the celebration of the birth of the Son of Light. Traditionally Christmas lasted for Twelve Nights, from December 25 to January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, once the old date of Christmas. During the medieval period, no villeins worked their lord's land during this time. In fact, their lord was obliged to provide a feast for them. As in the ancient Roman feast of Saturnalia, medieval Britons enjoyed a reversal of the social order by crowning a Lord of Misrule, a common born man who lorded it over the gentry to guarantee hilarity for all.

This was a time of carol singing, games, and "guizing" - wild processions in animal masks that draw on the lore of the Wild Hunt that swept down from the sky across Northern and Middle Europe during the Twelve Nights. This kind of guizing still takes place every Christmas in the town of Kirschseeon near Munich, Germany. Mummers wear elaborately carved wooden masks and run through the woods in the Perchtenlauf, in eldritch celebration of the Rauhnaechte, the twelve nights of Yule, a time of much superstition, when it was believed that old Gods roared through the sky and the dead spirits walked the earth. The Perchtenlauf takes its name from Frau Percht, a figure that is closely associated with Frau Holle, who may have her roots in an old Goddess.

Traditionally the time for telling ghost stories was not Halloween, but the Twelve Nights, time out of time when all kinds of uncanny things could come to pass. Animals spoke in human speech. Water turned to wine. The future could be foretold. All spinning stopped and no wheel could turn. Time stood still. The world held its breath, awaiting the return of the light. In Glastonbury, the Holy Thorn Tree on Wearyall Hill bloomed on Christmas day.

This beautiful short film invites viewers to devote 12 minutes on each of the Twelve Nights to silent contemplation of the mysteries of this season. Anyone, of any spiritual tradition, can reclaim the numinous grace of this time out of time.

A dear friend of mine has reclaimed the beauty and power of Hanukkah. She read about how Hanukkah didn't really start with the Maccabees, how it was a much older holiday than that - and originally about bringing light to dark places. "So in every way I can," she says, "I use this season to bring light to dark places. Literally, figuratively, whatever. Sometimes it's just about watching the sun go down, turning on the light in the dining room, and saying out loud, 'Thank you for this miracle of light in my home after the sun has gone.'"

May all of us bring light into dark places.

Wishing you all a joyous Midwinter and a New Year filled with happiness and peace,

Mary

The newly released paperback edition of Daughters of the Witching Hill is now shipping! You can order it here.

All Hallows Tide in Pendle

2010-10-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

When Halloween comes around, the popular imagination turns to ghosts and hauntings. And to witches.

Especially in my neck of the woods. I live in Pendle Witch Country, the rugged Pennine landscape surrounding Pendle Hill, once home to twelve individuals arrested for witchcraft in 1612.

Unfortunately Halloween seems to drag out all kinds of ghoulish speculation about historical witches and cunning folk in a way that is not only historically inaccurate but disrespectful to the dead. The Pendle Witches were not ghouls, but real people who were held for months in a lightless dungeon in Lancaster Castle, chained to a ring in the stone floor, before being tried without a barrister, condemned on the testimony of a nine-year-old girl, and then hanged. The historical truth is far more chilling than any fabricated horror story.

So let this All Hallows Tide be not an excuse for macabre speculation but let us light a candle in the memory of those men and women from Pendle Forest who died unjustly:

Elizabeth Southerns, Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redfearn, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock, and Jennet Preston.

The artist Alanna Marohnic created this illustration for my article "Mother Demdike: Ancestor of My Heart" in the new "Grandmother Gaia" issue of SageWoman Magazine. However, the magazine felt the image was perhaps too disturbing. Alanna nonetheless wanted to share her artwork with me because she felt so moved by the Pendle Witches' story, she felt it in order for someone to witness what happened to them at the gallows. It is with her kind permission that I reprint the image here.

From my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill:

You’ll not find our graves anywhere. God-fearing folk do not bury witches on consecrated ground, or even in the unhallowed plot beyond the churchyard walls where the suicides and unchristened go. After I died in gaol, they burned my corpse, then buried my charred bones on the wild heath overlooking Lancaster Castle. Three months on, they did the same to Alizon, Liza, Jamie, and the rest of them hanged upon that dazzling August day. No crosses mark our resting place, just heather and nesting lapwing. Only our names lingered on and the lies they told about us.

Away in Pendle Forest, Nowell ordered his men to bring down Malkin Tower stone by stone till only the foundation remained. Yet he could never banish me and mine from these parts. This is our home. Ours. We will endure, woven into the land itself, its weft and warp, like the very stones and the streams that cut across the moors.

What is yonder that casts a light so far-shining?
My own dear children hanging from the gallows tree.
Hanging sore by twisted neck,
How they gasp and how they thrash.

Stay shut, hell door.
Let my children arise and come home to me.
Neither stick nor stake has the power to keep thee.

Open the gate wide. Step through the gate. Come, my children. Come home.

May justice be served. May ancestral memory be served. May we dream true and have a blessed All Hallows.

Witch Persecutions, Women, and Social Change--Germany: 1560 - 1660

2010-10-26T03:28:00.000-07:00

"The Evil Wife" by Israhel van Meckenem, 1440/1445-1503
A woman, encouraged by a demon, beats her husband with her distaff.

PART TWO

By the latter half of the 15th century, the feudal agrarian economy was beginning to crumble, while the capitalist market economy was growing more and more powerful, as did economic competition between men and women. Men active in the market economy tried to further their interests by simultaneously excluding women from many professions and trying to marginalize the domestic economy by claiming that home-produced goods were inferior to shop-produced goods. The guilds also began excluding women. Feeling their livelihood threatened by the competition with wealthy burghers, who set up their own industries and arranged for peasants to manufacture goods for them, male guild members struggled to initiate restrictions for women in the guilds. In 1494 in Cologne, for example, women were driven out of the harness-making guild for the first time. (Rauer 108).

In addition, traditionally "female" professions such as medicine were being taken over by men; male doctors had grown popular among the wealthy classes and were now also making inroads on medical care for the lower classes, and even encroaching on the very traditionally feminine occupation of midwifery (Ehrenreich and English 15-16--please note that the scholarship of this particular text has been called into question). Now we see the beginning of the sexual division of labor: women were beginning to be pushed into the ever-shrinking domestic economy, while men attempted to make the market economy their exclusive domain. This trend not only effected women on a purely economic level, but it also had a profound effect on women's social and sexual status. "The contraction and redefinition of women's productive and domestic roles was consistent with changes in the ideology of sexuality" (Merchant 150).

The Renaissance also ushered in a new ideal of bourgeois womanhood. The domestic sphere of the housewife and mother was idealized by Protestant intellectuals such as Martin Luther. "Gott hat Mann und Frau geschaffen, das Weib zum Mehren mit Kinder tragen; den Mann zum Naehren und Wehren," the Father of the Reformation wrote, advocating strict gender roles. "Im weltlichen politischen Regiment und Handeln antugen sie [Frauen] nichts, dazu sind Maenner geschaffen und geordnet von Gott, nicht die Weiber" (Rauer 112-113). (God created man and woman so that the woman would bear children and that the man would provide and defend. In worldly politics and trade, women should have no part--God created and ordained men for this, not women.) It must, however, be pointed out that Luther's own wife, the ex-nun Katharina von Bora was a very strong woman, beloved by her husband, who addressed her as "Herrin," or "my boss." She took charge of their household finances, farmed, raised and slaughtered livestock, and brewed vast quantities of beer to support Luther and his theology students and keep their household fed. She was the sole woman to take part in Luther's otherwise exclusively male "table talk" discussions.

Despite the positive recognition of woman as wife and mother that took place in the early Reformation, the misogynist ideology of the Catholic Church, such as Thomas Aquinas's contention that women are by nature morally weaker than men, remained in both Catholic and Protestant Churches. Also, Renaissance humanism pushed upper class women into the narrow role of being well-educated but submissive helpmates to their scholarly husbands. In 1499, Konrad Reutinger extolled his wife as the perfect Renaissance woman:

habe ich als Gattin ein Maedchen heimgefuehrt . . . schamhaft, bescheiden, schoen, etwas erfahren in den lateinischen Wissenschaften, die nie von ihren Hausgenossen streit- order schmaehsuechtig gesehen worden ist . . . . Daher weiss ich dem besten und groessten Gott jetzt und in Zukunft Dank, der meinem Studium eine Gefaehrtin und Anhaengerin gegeben hat, die mir aufs innigste vertraut ist. (Ibid 133)

(I've taken a girl home to be my wife [who is] modest, docile, beautiful, with some knowledge of Latin that those in her household have never come to view as overly ambitious or aggressive . . . . For this I thank the best and greatest God now and always, that he has given me for my studies a companion and follower in whom I trust absolutely.)

The Renaissance also saw the birth of a brand new bourgeois motherhood ideal. In the Middle Ages, mothers were expected to take care of their young children, but the mother-child bond was not as glorified to an almost sacred institution and be-all and end-all of a woman's existence as it would become in later centuries. Also, childhood, as we now view it, did not exist then; children were treated as small adults. Children of the lower classes who survived infant hunger and childhood diseases were sent away from their parents as soon as they were old enough to find work as servants in the wealthier estates (Hoher 20).

In the second half of the 15th century, the Catholic Church was losing its authority, under threat by serious challenges and dissent that would soon take the shape of the Reformation. During this divisive time, the Catholic Church expressed a new kind of religious aggression in enforcing morality and a new fascination with the devil. The hedonism that had reigned in medieval plebeian culture was no longer to be benignly overlooked. Wifely obedience in marriage began to be emphasized more and more. During this period, a new genre of literature originated: the Devil Book, which concentrated on explaining how certain activities, such as dancing and drinking, were sinful. The general effect of these publications was to imply that the devil was everywhere (Midelfort 69). The Catholic Church's attitude towards witchcraft also changed quite significantly--the ancient code saying it was sinful to believe in witches was reversed; now Church officials declared it sinful not to believe in them. They argued that a new sect had developed, which even the Fathers of the Church had been unable to foresee (Chamberlin 137). In 1484, Pope Innocent and two German Dominican friars, Kramer and Sprenger, issued a bull against witchcraft in response to rumors of widespread witch activity in Germany. This bull granted the use of inquisitorial techniques in witch hunting. Although the late 15th century was noted for religious intolerance, it was also characterized by a "new carelessness in law" (Ibid 69). The use of torture was revived with the re-establishment of Roman Law. This resulted in a considerable escalation in witch persecutions: "Torture allowed accusations to proliferate to epidemic proportions, because once a witch confessed under torture, she would be tortured again to divulge the names of her neighbors seen at the Sabbat" (Ruether 102). In 1486, Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum was published. This highly misogynistic witch-hunting manual established the belief that women are by nature more prone to witchcraft than men: "Femina comes from Fe [faith] and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold the faith . . . . Therefore, a wicked woman is by her nature quicker to waver in her faith, and consequently quicker to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft" (Malleus 44). The authors of the book were also obsessed with the idea that the unquenchable carnal lust of women drove them to the devil: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable . . . . Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils . . . it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men infected with the heresy of witchcraft (Ibid 43).

As we have seen, women were beginning to be perceived as a threat to the new economic and religious developments. One cannot imagine that they were at all cooperative with the new infringements on the relative economic and sexual freedom they had enjoyed in the past. They would not submit easily to these changes--they would resist--and their resistance would make them a threat to the interests of the new order. In the arts and media of this period, women were constantly portrayed as domineering, threatening, lustful, violent, and powerful: a force that must be quelled. Village festivals of this period often had floats featuring wives beating their husbands, hurling refuse and rocks at them, and verbally abusing them. Numerous art works of this era, especially the works of Hans Baldung Grien and Albrecht Duerer, depicted the supposed disorder wrought by lusty women. Popular illustrations portrayed women beating their husbands with distaffs. Spinning was one of the occupations with which a woman could still make a decent living. The distaff symbolized her earning power and economic independence from her husband. These male artists interpreted woman's breadwinning power as something threatening, something she abused: her pride of being able to earn undermined her husband's authority. These women were not conforming to the new mold of wifely obedience that Church officials were stressing more and more. Thus, not only were women a threat to their husband's authority, they were also a threat to society in general.

One 1521 engraving by Urs Graf (unfortunately I could not find a jpeg of it to post here) depicts two young women savagely beating a monk who has probably molested them. In the Renaissance, women were portrayed as capable of violence, revenge, and self-defense. Urs Graf's women respect neither male nor religious authority; they assume the right to punish any man who tries to molest them. Hans Baldung Grien's engraving, "Aristotle and Phyllis," below, shows the legendary Phyllis literally making an ass of Aristotle. In all these pictures, women are portrayed as violent, crafty, and insubordinate. Their male victims are portrayed as pathetic, weak-willed fools for allowing themselves to be dominated by women. The message that I read into these art works is that women are trying to hold the upper hand. They will not allow themselves to be forced into the new "proper" feminine sphere. In order for women to be put in their place, men must assert their dominance. Thus, these male artists perceive women as a powerful, chaotic force that needed to be violently subdued. This violence against women would not be long in coming.

"Hercules among the maids of Queen Omphale" by Lucus Cranach the Elder: these women are emasculating the mighty Hercules by dressing him in a women's coif and pressing a distaff into his hand.

"Aristotle and Phyllis" by Hans Baldung Grien, 1513.
Aristotle who proclaimed that the male is superior to the female is shown subjected to Phyllis who literally makes an ass of him.

Witch Persecutions, Women, and Social Change

2010-10-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

I recently revisited my Senior Paper, written in 1988 at the University of Minnesota. Although some of my sources are *very* dated, most of the actual historical information seems to have stood up to the test of time and, though my focus in this paper was Germany, much of this material seems prescient for what I would later write in DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL.

Especially important in my research was the realization that women in the Middle Ages actually had more economic power and independence than they did in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period. I highly recommend Joan Kelly's iconic essay, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?", reprinted in Women, History & Theory: the Essays of Joan Kelly, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

So as an All Hallows offering, I thought I would repost my paper here, in digestible chapters. Keep in mind that I was a college senior when I wrote it, not a PhD candidate, and that I majored in German, so some of my sources are German language. Please note that in the twenty years after I wrote this papar, a lot more scholarship has been done on historical witchcraft studies, and if you are interested in reading more, please refer to the more recent books. I'll try to post a more updated reading list later.

Witch Persecutions, Women, and Social Change: Germany: 1560 - 1660

Part One

The 16th and 17th centuries were one of the bleakest periods for European women. From roughly 1560 to 1660, the witch hysteria claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, around 75% of whom were women, many of them older women of the lower classes (Ruether 111). One of the worst areas of persecution at this time was Southwest Germany. The question I shall try to answer in this essay is why the witch persecutions often seemed to focus on poor, elderly women. Were these women viewed as a threat to the social order to be violently subdued? What is the historical context for this? How do the persecutions relate to the rise of capitalism, the decline of the domestic economy, the male takeover of tradtionally female professions, the tightening moral and religious strictures, and the peasant rebellions? I will begin to try to answer these questions by tracing the development of the witch burnings over history and the status of women in these different historical periods: from the Middle Ages, when there were very few witch persecutions and women enjoyed relative economic and sexual freedom; to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when men and women began to compete in the market economy and women were beginning to be perceived as a threat, and the number of witch persecutions significantly increased; to the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, when the mass persecutions took place and women were forced into a far more restricted sphere, ecnomonically and morally, than they had experienced during the medieval period.

Very little witch persecution took place in the medieval period. Although, by the early Middle Ages, most of Europe had been at least nominally Christianized, many old pagan folk ways survived. Such tradtional seasonal festivities such as Walpurgis (May Eve), Fastnacht (the wild festivities that preceded the solemn fast of Lent), harvest homes, and the like often featured much feasting, drinking, and sexual licentiousness. Church officials did not necessarily condone these activities, but the Church, at this point in history, was content to erect a superstructure of Christianity over this rural plebian culture (Ibid 93). To a great extent, the Church looked the other way in cases of lapses in sexual morality, and men and women often did as they pleased. Thus, the customs and behaviors which would later be connected with witchcraft were tolerated and often ignored by the early medieval Church (Ibid 99).

During the Middle Ages, beliefs about what constituted magic and witchcraft slowly evolved. During the early medieval period, the Church viewed witchcraft and magic merely as pagan superstition. In the 8th century, for example, Boniface, the English apostle of Germany, declared that believing in witches was unchristian. In the same century, Emperor Charlesmagne denounced witch burnings as foul remnants of paganism and initiated the death penalty in newly converted Saxony for anyone who committed this sinful act (Trevor-Roper 92). Having firmly established witch persecutions as pagan superstition, the Church maintained a healthy skepticism in regard to the idea of witchcraft (Midelfort 14). In fact, up until the late 15th century, the Church declared it a sin to even believe in witches (Chamberlin 137). Thus, the medieval period until this point was far more "enlightened" in regard to the subject of witchcraft than the next few generations would be. As we shall see, the witch craze was a phenomenon of the Renaissance, Reformation, and early modern period.

The econominc structure of the medieval period until about 1450 was based on the feudal agrarian system, peasant control of production, and a dominant domestic economy. The peasants worked the lord's land and this guaranteed them their livelihood: from the harvest, they took what they needed for survival, while the lord took the surplus. Feudalism necessitated cooperation and interdependence on the part of peasants. For example, the introduction of the heavy plow during Carolingian times made it necessary for the serfs to work together to get a plow and a team of horses or oxen for it. They also decided communally what to plant, where they would plant, which fields to leave fallow, how crops should be rotated, and how the harvest should be divided. Although the landlord benefitted the most from this system, the peasants made the major decisions and controlled production. This subsistence ecnonomy was a domestic economy: almost all the goods necessary for survival were produced by peasant family units in the household (Ketsch 83).

The domestic agrarian economy and culture allowed women relative economic freedom. Work among the lower classes did not have any rigid gender division at the time. Male and female peasants worked alongside each other in the fields. Male and female servants of the same class often did identical work. The only female-specific work was housework, child-rearing, midwifery, and prostitution. In addition, herbal medicine and the crafts of brewing, spinning, and weaving were thought to be more "female" than "male" professions. Among the lower classes, however there was no specifically "male" work. Rigidly defined gender spheres existed only among the feudal nobility: women were responsible for reproduction and household management, while men took over martial responsibilities (Hoher 14).

No rigid gender division was evident in the market economy at this time, however. Men and women participated on a relatively equal basis in the flourishing craft guilds in the imperial cities. In the 13th through 15th centuries, women were admitted to all guilds. Although, in the early Middle Ages, there had been restrictions regarding independent female masters--that is women masters not married or related to male masters--this situation improved in the 13th century. Women began founding their own guilds and taking part on a more equal basis in the mixed guilds (Hoher 15). A document from a yarn making guild in Cologne in the last 14th century, for example, gives detailed regulations specifically regarding female apprentices and female masters: "Welches Maedchen das Garnhandwerk in Koeln lernen will, das soll vier Jahre dienen and nicht weniger . . . . Und sie soll in den vier Jahren nicht mehr als zwei Frauen dienen." (If a girl wants to learn the yarn making craft in Cologne, she must apprentice at least four years . . . . and in these four years, she should serve no more than two women.) This document also outlines the special provisions made for husbands of deceased female masters. Another guild document gives evidence for both male and female masters working in a bath house: "Kein Meister and keine Meisterin soll eines anderen Badegaeste zu sich bitten, bei einer Strafe von halben Pfund." (Rauer 104). (No male master or female master should solicit someone else's bath guest client, on pain of a fine of half a pound.) Women were also quite acrive in selling and trading, especially in materials commonly used in both medicine and folk magic. (Hoher 16).

From the 12th to the mid 15th century, Europe was underpopulated and the workforce needed women. At this time, there was little economic competition between the sexes and the split between the domestic and the market economy had not yet been fully established (Ketsch 117). So, as we have seen, women were relatively economically independent during this period.

There were also viable alternatives to the domestic sphere of marriage and motherhood during the Middle Ages. Convents attracted noblewomen who wished to free themselves from a life of child-rearing and to devote themselves to religion and learning. Beguinages--urban and secular all female communes--motivated women of the lower classes to leave the country for the city. Some women even became vagabond musicians and mercenary soldiers. There were also a few female hermits: single women who lived on the outskirts of towns and forests, and often practiced herbal medicine. These solitary women would later become victims of the witch hysteria in the Renaissance (Boulding 210-211).

The feudal agrarian system was not to last forever. The landlords' tendency to extract from unfree peasants any handy income above subsistence meant that these peansant were unable to give back what they took from the land. Thus, a combination of bad farming techniques leading to soil depletion, steady population growth, and the overtaxation of peasants by land owners all contributed to the gradual breakdown of the feudal agrarian economy and ecosystem (Marchant 47). As the feudal agrarian and domestic economy wanted, the capitalist market economy grew stronger. This had a profound effect on the socio-economic status of women.

During the years 1450 to 1550, very dramatic economic, social, and religious changes took place that would threaten the status and freedom that medieval women had enjoyed. Up until 1450, both sexes were needed in the economy, but afterwards, competition began to take place between the sexes in the market economy. It is during this period that the sexual division of labor, and the separation between the market and the domestic economy began to develop. As men struggled to gain supremacy in the market economy and to push women, their competitors, out of the guilds and into the domestic economy, which was becoming more and more marginalized, women resisted. Women were beginning to be viewed by men as a threat to the order of society. At the same time, a tightening in the moral and religious strictures in both the Catholic and the newly developing Protestant Churches began. The sexual licentiousness, dancing, and drinking that had been commonplace in the medieval period was increasingly frowned upon. Religious authorities grew more obsessed with morality, and the concepts of the devil and witchcraft than they had been before. During this period, the number of witch persecutions rose significantly. The events that took place between 1450 and 1550, thus, were decisive in laying down the foundation for the later witch crazes of 1560 to 1660.

Boulding, Elise. "Familial Constraints on Women's Working Roles," Women and the Politics of Culture, Zak & Moots, eds., Longman Inc., New York, 1983.

Chamberlin, E.R., Everyday Life in Renaissance Times, Pedigree, London, 1965.

Hoher, Friederike. "Hexe, Maria und Hausmutter--zur Geschichte der Weiblichkeit im Spaetmittelalter," Frauen in der Geschichte (Vol. III), Kuhn & Rusen, eds., Paedagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1983.

Ketsch, Peter. Frauen im Mittelalter (Vol. I) Kuhn (ed.), Paedagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1983.

Midelfort, Erik, H. C. Witch Hunting in Southwest Germany 1562-1684: The Social Foundations, Stanford, 1972.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1979.

Rauer, Brigitte. "Hexenwahn--Frauenverfolgung zur Beginn der Neuzeit," Frauen in der Geschichte (Vol. II), Kuhn & Rusen, (eds.), Paedagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1982.

Reuther, Rosemary. New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.

Trevor-Roper, H.R. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Harper & Row, New York, 1969.

Writing Women Back into History

2010-10-22T03:19:00.001-07:00

This illustration, from Wikipedia Media Commons, depicts medieval women hunting.

This article of mine was originally published in the May 2008 issue of Solander Magazine, published by the Historical Novel Society.

We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust.

This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed into the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father and the celebrated chronicle of my brother.
Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover the buried histories of women, we historical novelists must act as detectives, studying the sparse clues that have been handed down to us. To create engaging and nuanced portraits of women in history, we must learn to read between the lines and fill in the blanks.

At its best, historical fiction can indeed play a crucial role in writing women back into history and challenging our misperceptions about women in the past. In her stunning novel The Red Tent, Anita Diamant turns our image of women in the Old Testament on its head by allowing the Biblical Dinah to tell her own story in her own voice. Donna Cross’s novel Pope Joan explores the tantalizing possibility that a 9th century woman might have once sat on the papal throne. In The Thrall’s Tale, Judith Lindbergh paints an unforgettable portrait of Thorbjorg, the 10th century Norse seidkona, or seeress, straight off the pages of the Saga of Erik the Red. Paul Anderson’s 1376 page epic Hunger’s Brides illuminates the life of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 17th century Mexican nun who became the greatest New World poet of her age. Sor Juana fans will also want to read Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s novel Sor Juana’s Second Dream.

While many authors have focused on documented historical figures, others have embraced the ellipses in history as an invitation to speculate on women’s secret lives and untold stories. “Where history and biography are about the public world, fiction is about the private world,” says Jude Morgan, author of Passion and Indiscretion. “And that [private world] was perforce the women’s world, too: the private, often including the hidden and the unspoken. That’s where historical fiction can be revealing.” In her novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith, Sarah Waters imagines the smoldering passions that might have passed between women behind the façade of prim Victorian decorum. Jean Rhys, in her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea, resurrects the silenced Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and brings her to life as a tragically misunderstood Creole heiress. Louise Erdrich has written an entire body of work portraying the women (and men) of her mother’s line, the Anishinaabe Nation.

Not surprisingly, many of these novels that capture the hidden truths of women’s histories have been runaway bestsellers. Diamant’s Red Tent, first published in 1997 with no advertising budget, became a word of mouth blockbuster and went on to sell to 25 foreign markets, while Cross’s Pope Joan is now in its 18th printing and inspired a major motion picture starring German-born actress Franka Potente. Louise Erdrich’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning first novel Love Medicine has never been out of print.

At the end of the day, it’s a question of knowing your market. Although it’s hard to pin-point precise figures, the majority of buyers and readers of historical fiction appear to be women and they seem to crave books that present compelling portraits of strong female protagonists.

Most interesting is the possibility that historical fiction’s rewriting of women’s history has wider repercussions in the world of nonfiction.

“Historical fiction has a way of bringing figures neglected (or subordinated) by the history books back into the foreground,” says Bethany Latham, Managing Editor of HNR. “Historical fiction can do this where history tomes fail because it is fiction –it’s not bound strictly by documented fact. For instance, an historical fiction author can write an engrossing novel centering around a ‘minor’ female courtier, where a truly enlightening biography of the woman is problematic due to the dearth of historical information about her (think Philippa Gregory's Boleyn Inheritance versus Julia Fox’s exceedingly speculative biography of Viscountess Rochford).

“Historical fiction treatments thrust historical female figures, whether they be aristocrats or serving maids, into the public eye,” Latham continues. “Nonfiction authors cannot help but be influenced by the rampant popularity of a particular historical period or person promulgated by historical fiction and the screen adaptations the novels spawn; it causes them to look for their own ‘angle’ – for what hasn’t been done, what’s been overlooked – in order to focus their research on it. . . . Historical fiction can grab [women] by the farthingale and drag them into the limelight, leading to greater interest in them, more research into their lives, and subsequently a greater understanding of the part women have played in history.”

jay Dixon, author of The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon: 1909-1990s, speculates that historical novelists may have been pioneers in the women’s history movement. “Ever since the publication of Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History in 1973, feminists have been trying to rescue women from their invisibility in male discourses of history,” says Dixon. “But prior to that, women authors, in their historical novels, fore-fronted women – the wealthy, the poor, the powerful and the downtrodden – from all periods and all locales. Using imagination alongside research, they told the stories that could have happened, and maybe did. And in doing so not only gave voices to the voiceless, but also changed our perception of the past.”

HNR Editor Sarah Johnson cites Anya Seton’s classic novel The Winthrop Woman, first published in 1958, which tells the story of 17th century Elizabeth Winthrop, wife of Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The novel reveals how she defied her husband and community in order to befriend Anne Hutchinson, the famous heretic who later went on to found the colony of Rhode Island.

Exploding myths

Unfortunately writers can run into problems when they present a view of historical women that challenges our common misperceptions. On the one hand, readers and critics are justifiably skeptical about novelists who present plucky historical heroines with attitudes that feel too contemporary and thus anachronistic to their time and place. On the other hand, if you sit down and do the research, you will discover that every epoch had its radical voices, movers and shakers, extraordinary women who rocked the establishment. Think of Sappho, Hypatia, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I of England, Aphra Benn, Anne Bonny the Pirate Queen, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Parks, to name a few. Too often readers and, unfortunately some reviewers, appear to have a distorted and uninformed view of women in history and seem too quick to label any strong heroine anachronistic, even if the author has backed up the fiction with considerable research. Too often we base our picture of women in the past on the lazy assumption that all women throughout all of history were completely downtrodden and disempowered.

In preparation for the Rewriting Women’s History panel at the 2007 HNS North American Conference in Albany, New York, I conducted an informal survey with members of the HNS email discussion list, asking what they thought were the most annoying historical clichés about women. Here are some of the responses:

Women’s lives were completely limited to the domestic sphere.

Before Betty Friedan came along, all women were housewives and mothers and nothing else.

Women in the Victorian era led lives of leisure. (In fact, very few did.)

Women in the past did not enjoy sex.

Dr. Irene Burgess, Provost and Dean of Eureka College, Illinois, reminds us that what we know – or think we know – about women in history is mediated and changes over time. “Representing historical women in twenty-first century fiction can be difficult,” Burgess points out, “because of the automatic lenses that a current audience places on the behavior of women from an older period. Because mores and language were so different, it’s frequently difficult for current-day readers to believe that women of the past had autonomy, capability, and choice.

“A lower class woman of the 14th century in England,” Burgess continues, “probably had greater degrees of freedom than an aristocratic woman of the 18th century in Italy. Although readers may perceive it as anachronistic to have a female weaver going to the tavern with some of her friends and telling her husband to take a hike if he protests, that probably did happen.”

Dr. Samantha Riches, Director of Studies for History and Archaeology at Lancaster University, UK, agrees that the reality of medieval women’s lives defy our popular conceptions. “The idea that women sat around creating tapestries and looking wistful is still quite widespread, largely due to Hollywood films perpetuating the same stereotyped ideas. Sources about women’s personal experiences are few and far between, but we do have a few gems like the Paston letters (accessible via the Internet Medieval Sourcebook), which can give us a real insight into the lives of late medieval women. In 1448 Margaret Paston wrote to her husband John with a shopping list including almonds, sugar and crossbows: he was away in London and she was aware that she would need to organize defense of their property in East Anglia against a neighbor with whom they were involved in a dispute.”

Although there are even fewer sources regarding the lives of common women, Riches believes that the visual evidence tends to indicate that women were employed in a wide range of occupations. Erika Uitz’s scholarly study Women in the Medieval Town reveals that women worked as merchants, money-lenders, brewers, and even miners. One of the book’s illustrations shows a detail of Hans Hesse’s early 16th century “Miners’ Altar” panel painting, which depicts a woman washing the heavy iron ore—a job that was even more backbreaking than mining.

The colorful lives of medieval women have inspired Paul Doherty’s most recent mystery series, centered on 14th century physician Mathilde of Westminster, who is based on a historical figure. “We tend to think of women’s rights developing over the centuries; this is simply not true,” Doherty said when I interviewed him in the May 2006 Historical Novels Review. “I think it was Dorothy Mary Stenton, the famous Anglo-Saxon historian, who pointed out that women had more rights in 1100 then they did in 1800!”

Indeed, the 1800s would appear a big stumbling block in our perceptions of the past. “The early 19th century marked the nadir of European women’s options and possibilities,” Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser write in A History of Their Own, Volume 2. “The creation of ‘women’s movements’ in the 19th century was in part a response to this.”

The Victorian era in particular has made a lasting imprint on the modern psyche. Suzanne Adair, author of Paper Woman and panelist at the Albany conference, notes that too often people look at women in the past through the lens of Victorian culture and base their view of women in completely disparate epochs on this stilted stereotype of the tightly corseted, sexually repressed Angel of the Home. “We like to think of ourselves as much more progressive than earlier generations,” Irene Burgess adds, “but when it comes to issues such as sexuality and the body, we actually are more repressed – a product of our Victorian ancestry. One only has to think of the Wife of Bath or the poems of Sappho to realize that that is the case.”

But even 19th century women’s lives were more complex than many realize: the Industrial Revolution drove countless women and girls out of the kitchens and into factories and mills, inspiring the line in the popular early 19th century folksong, The Weaver and the Factory Maid:

Where are the girls? I will tell you plain:
The girls have gone to weave by steam,
And to find them you must rise at dawn,
And trudge to the mill in the early morn.

As astute historians will point out, women throughout history have always worked. One of the experiences that inspired my third novel, The Vanishing Point, set in Colonial America, was a visit to a tiny Philadelphia row house where two 18th century seamstresses once lived and plied their trade. I felt immediately drawn into their world. It was exciting for me to see the proof that even in this era, when nearly every factor of the dominant religion and economy herded women into marriage and domesticity, some women still succeeded in carving out independent, masterless lives, ruled by neither father nor husband.

In Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich reveals that wives in Colonial America frequently acted as their spouse’s business partners, running shops and farms in tandem with their men, and sometimes taking over the role of “deputy husband,” which meant shouldering male duties, sometimes acting as surrogate if the husband were away. She cites one Edith Creford of Salem, Massachusetts, who acted as an attorney for her husband and signed a promissory note for £33, a considerable sum at that time. While researching my article Portals to Hidden Histories (Solander, November 2006), which showcased the living history sites at Historic St. Mary’s City, Jamestown Settlement and Colonial Williamsburg, I learned of 18th century businesswomen and entrepreneurs, such as Jane Vobe, who ran the King’s Arms Tavern in Williamsburg and Ann Wager, who founded the Bray School for African American children in 1760.

But the details of how women contributed to the economy tend to get buried under the perceived restrictions on these women’s lives and their subordinate place in their culture. When examining the rules women are expected to follow, Irene Burgess reminds us that “that rules and injunctions are only put in place when people actually do the behavior that is being controlled. So, ‘thou shalt not kill’ wouldn’t have been necessary if human beings weren’t so fond of slaughter. Similarly, telling women they had to be ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ meant that probably, for the most part, women were not any of those things.”

Practical Writing Advice

So how can historical novelists create strong, authentic, and convincing female characters without resorting to either anachronism or lazy stereotypes?

Pick Your Heroine

Perhaps the most straightforward method is to choose an arresting historical figure, either famous or obscure, and delve deep into the research in order to bring her to life. Ask yourself what historical personae appeal to you and why.

“When I chose Juana la Loca as the subject for my second novel, I knew I’d set myself up for a challenge.” says CW Gortner, whose novel The Last Queen is published by Ballantine. “I’ve been obsessed by her since my childhood in Spain and I found the lurid myth of her life hard to believe. History is rarely kind to women, particularly women in power, so I set out to discover if the story of the ‘mad queen of Spain’ was true. It took six years of delving, but slowly the web of misinformation and calumny began to unravel. For nearly five hundred years, Juana of Castile’s story has been distorted because she posed a threat.”

Internationally best-selling author Sandra Gulland followed up her wildly popular Josephine Bonaparte Trilogy with a new novel focused on a much more elusive character: Louise de la Vallière, the first mistress of the Sun King, Louis XIV. “She is described as timid, something of a wallflower,” says Gulland of her heroine. “She was a daring horsewoman, a mistress to the Sun King, a Carmelite nun. The combination of these qualities intrigued me.”

Michelle Moran, whose debut novel Nefertiti was a national bestseller, finds herself drawn to the stories of infamous women whose lives have previously only been narrated through the words of men. “I’ve never been able to believe that women throughout history fit neatly into the simple categories that ancient writers created for them: that of the loyal virgin or the scheming harlot,” Moran states. “From Jezebel to Nefertiti, I find that rewriting women’s history is not just a career, it’s a calling.”

Zoom in on a specific historical event

The Pendle Witch Trial of 1612 provided the foundation for my most recent novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Seven women and two men were hanged as witches, based on the “evidence” given by a nine-year-old girl, who betrayed and condemned her own family. The most notorious of all the witches was the girl’s grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, who died in Lancaster Gaol before she came to trial. Researching the trial, I was deeply drawn into this family tragedy, especially the tale of Southerns herself, a cunning woman and healer of long standing, whose “charms” were Catholic prayers and whose reputation was so fearsome that court clerk Thomas Potts wrote that “no man escaped her, or her Furies.”

Katharine Weber’s acclaimed novel Triangle centers on the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911. “It was striking to me how little the fire had been written about in books from then until the mid 1960s when a flourishing industry of books about the Triangle fire, most of them written for young girls, suddenly appeared, and have continued to appear every year. Why? It has to be the women’s movement. This helped me focus on one of the crucial themes of my novel, the way we don’t just tell our stories with agendas, we listen with agendas as well. . . . Triangle, like the fire itself, is a story about courageous women whose bravery was mostly obscured by the agendas of the moment.”

Focus on a particular subculture

One way to come up with a unique angle on history is to select your favorite historical period and then delve into a corner of that society that fascinates you.

Susanne Dunlap’s novels Emilie’s Voice and Liszt’s Kiss revolve around the world of music in 18th and 19th century Europe. Dunlap, who has a doctorate in music history from Yale, says that music was one way that talented women could distinguish themselves. “Women as performers were placed in the public eye and often then considered damaged goods – like prostitutes,” says Dunlap. “But many were able to support themselves and lead fulfilling artistic lives as singers, pianists, actresses. They achieved independence, and that was considered dangerous by men. Women as true creative artists – composers, painters, authors – were even more dangerous. Those are the stories that intrigue me, and give me the opportunity to rewrite women’s history.”

Keep it real for the reader

Author Melinda Hammond (A Rational Romance), who also writes as Sarah Mallory, reminds us that it’s essential to get the details right to keep your fiction convincing. “The trick is to create characters that are true to the period, yet have a resonance for a modern reader,” says Hammond. “It is important that we make readers aware of the prevailing customs and culture of a particular period or they will not understand why our characters act in a particular way. It is up to the writer to ‘set the stage,’ capture the spirit of the period and create the right background for the characters.”

Hammond believes that this is especially pertinent for romantic fiction. “In historical terms, romance is a relatively modern concept,” she explains. “It’s only in the last couple of centuries that people have come to expect to fall in love and marry.”

The future of women’s history

Samantha Riches believes that academic historians are moving away from the concept of “woman as other” to a more complex, multilayered view of the past. “For the last twenty to thirty years women’s history has been ‘recovered’ by academic historians, led by feminist commentators, not to the fullest extent possible for sure, but nevertheless I would argue that women are now featuring strongly in many studies of the past,” Riches states. “The extent to which this change has filtered through into popular perceptions is another matter, but I’d like to think that there is a gradual shift towards seeing the history of women as something that is integral to the study and understanding of the past, rather than as something separate and different.”

Sandra Gulland describes history as a continually moving target. “Our story of the past, how we understand it, is constantly in flux. New discoveries, new perspectives: all these help us to revise – reVISION – the past, or rather: the story of our past.”

A Brief History of Enchantment: Witchy October Reads

2010-10-13T02:17:00.000-07:00

This article of mine was originally published in the February 2010 Issue of Historical Novels Review.

A Brief History of Enchantment: Magic Goes Mainstream

Paranormal fiction is hot. Think of the huge popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight series; of adult fantasy/historical fiction crossovers such as Susanne Clarke’s eccentric doorstopper, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; not to mention Seth Grahame-Smith’s quirky genre-bender, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

“The publishing world has seen an explosion in fiction featuring a wide array of paranormal elements,” says literary agent Wendy Sherman. “Vampires, zombies, werewolves, and witches. Readers seem to have an unquenchable thirst that publishers, television, and film makers have been quick to respond to. Supernatural themes may once, not that long ago, have been seen as a side line, but today’s urban fantasy is a hugely popular genre all its own. When the rich detail of historical fiction is paired with fantastical elements we can reach an even broader audience of serious readers.”

Barbara Peters, owner of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore, speculates that the paranormal is so popular because it “both taps into ancient tropes offered in folklore and is a way of escaping the terrifying and uncertain world we live in.”

Witches, Wisefolk, and Kabbalists

Witches and wizards have long been a fixture in fantasy fiction. Until recently any adult fiction that embraced these themes was regarded as fantasy or horror by default. But a new wave of literary novels, revealing magic and witchcraft through the lens of well-researched history, is blurring the lines of genre and shedding fresh light on how our ancestors’ belief in the otherworldly permeated every aspect of their lives. These novelists take their readers into that lost enchanted world.

Our forbears believed that magic was real. Dr. John Dee, conjurer to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician, cartographer, and also an alchemist and a necromancer. In Dee’s England, more people relied on traditional cunning folk for healing than on physicians, who were so expensive that only the elite could afford them. Across world cultures, folk healers and other magical practitioners played a key role in their communities. Sometimes they were honored as wise folk, other times condemned as witches.

During the European witch persecutions from 1480 to 1700, an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people were executed. These witch hunts were not a phenomenon of the Middle Ages, as popularly believed, but of the Renaissance and Reformation, stretching up to the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. Some of those hanged or burned were actual cunning folk while others, likely the vast majority, were simply maligned victims of the witch-hunting frenzy. Recent titles illuminating the European witch hunts include Erika Mailman’s The Witch’s Trinity, set in 16th century Germany, and my own novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, which tells the true story of cunning woman Elizabeth Southerns, aka Mother Demdike, and her family’s struggle to survive the Pendle witch hunt of 1612.

By 1692, European witch mania had crossed the Atlantic and manifested itself in the infamous Salem Witch Trials which sentenced thirteen women and six men to death. The Salem tragedy provides the backdrop for two recent bestsellers. Kathleen Kent’s critically acclaimed novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, draws on the story of her ancestor, condemned witch Martha Carrier. Katherine Howe, the descendent of two accused witches, offers a more overtly supernatural slant in her novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which explores the possibility that at least some of the Salem witches may have been cunning folk with real powers. Suzy Witten’s small press debut, The Afflicted Girls, focuses not on the presumed witches but on their perceived victims and tries to solve the mystery underlying their hysteria.

“In writing The Heretic’s Daughter,” author Kathleen Kent states, “I worked to combine fact and fiction to illustrate the courage and fortitude of Martha Carrier, perhaps the only person who not only denied being a confederate of the Devil, but who very vocally confronted her judges, calling them to task for listening to a group of malicious, accusing girls.”

Reader Anne Gilbert describes her fascination with The Heretic’s Daughter. “Oddly, people of that time and place were both ‘superstitious’ in the modern sense, and, at the same time, and often in the same communities, there were others who were a bit more skeptical and ‘dared’ to disagree. As long as there wasn’t a whole lot of tension in these communities, you could just shrug your shoulders at them. But if there were tensions for any reason, such ‘skeptics’ often came under suspicion. The Heretic’s Daughter shows the process beautifully.”

Accused witches were not the only ones to face persecution. Richard Zimler’s stunning novel, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, set in 16th century Portugal, evokes the rich world of Jewish mysticism under fire in an age of inquisition and forced conversion.

Magic, Superstition, and Popular Culture

Beyond the witch trials, the very real belief in the supernatural shared by rich and poor, educated and illiterate in the Early Modern Period shaped a worldview vastly different from our own.

“Throughout the centuries, magic and the supernatural were considered by the majority of people to be the norm,” says Kim Murphy, author of Whispers from the Grave. “In my upcoming, as of yet untitled timeslip, not only have I shown that Salem wasn’t the only place on the North American continent that had witch trials, but that the 17th-century English were very similar to the Powhatan Indians in their supernatural beliefs. Today, these subjects are often regarded as New Age. In reality, they’re very, very old. I interweave them in my work because it helps me explore what the traditional cultures have been trying to tell us all along.”

Author Sandra Gulland, whose most recent novel, Mistress of the Sun, delves into the world of bone magic and horse whispering, agrees that it would be “historically inaccurate to write about the 17th century (or earlier, for that matter) and not include the mystical or paranormal — at the very least in the minds of your characters. Even the great mathematical genius Descartes believed that bad dreams were put into his head by demons.” Gulland cites Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, as an excellent example of how subtly layered beliefs in the supernatural can be woven into a narrative that is not explicitly about magic or witchcraft.

“When writing about people from the past, magic, superstition and the supernatural are important elements that we cannot ignore,” says C.W. Gortner, whose upcoming novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, explores Catherine’s relationship with the seer, Nostradamus. “Whether it is the occult menace implicit in Karen Maitland’s superb medieval novels or the struggles of my own Catherine de Medici against the savage fanaticism of her age, belief in the supernatural enriches and informs our work, and the consciousness of the characters we inhabit. It is crucial to the very world we attempt to conjure to life for our reader.”

Moving forward in time, some writers have used the occult as a vehicle for addressing the cynicism and horrors of the modern age. In Jake Arnott’s novel, The Devil’s Paintbrush, set in Paris at the dawning of the 20th century, the notorious Aleister Crowley takes the reader on a tour through a stygian underworld of black masses, hallucinogens, and apocalyptic visions. The devil’s paintbrush of the title refers to the newly invented automatic machine gun, which heralds a violent and godless new epoch.

Priestesses and Seers

Some novels draw on a magical history inspired by the polytheistic religions that flourished before the Christian conversions. Judith Lindbergh’s lyrical debut, The Thrall’s Tale, takes us to Viking-age Greenland and presents an arresting portrait of the seidkona, or seeress, Thorbjorg from the Saga of Eirik the Red. Lindbergh says she never really perceived Thorbjorg’s practice as “magic” anymore than she believes Thorbjorg herself did. “To my understanding, magic’s derogatory connotations are mostly the persistent and powerful effects of Christianity’s condemnation of the practices and practitioners of pre-Christian faiths,” the author observes. “I decided to portray the seidkona Thorbjorg in my novel as a priestess deeply committed to her faith.”

Similarly Kathleen Cunningham Guler’s novel, A Land Beyond Ravens, explores the indigenous Celtic religion that still held strong in 5th century Britain when Christianity was struggling to gain a foothold. Guler says her book gives a sense of how spirituality may have been interpreted as magic. “Two of the characters have what I’ve named ‘fire in the head,’ which is a kind of catch-all term for anything from visions and prophecy to the muse a bard or poet draws on for inspiration. One of those characters is Myrddin, aka Merlin. Of course he’s fictional, but it’s my conjecture that his ‘magic’ was his intelligent use of the knowledge gained from ‘fire in the head.’”

Beyond the shores of Europe, Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, shows how the trickster Nanapush “converts” missionary priest Damien Modeste, who is actually a woman in disguise, by introducing her to the Ojibwe spirit world.

Vampires and zombies

Other writers have taken a completely different route, wedding “straight” historical fiction to the fantastic and bizarre. In 1819 Lord Byron’s physician, John Polidori published his story “The Vampyre,” initiating the canon of English vampire fiction. The story was a hit, probably because the public assumed that the undead protagonist was modeled after bad boy Byron himself. Soon enough the vampire became a fixture in gothic literature. The late 20th century brought forth a literary vampire renaissance, beginning with Anne Rice’s series of novels, The Vampire Chronicles, first published in the 1970s, which attained cult status. The trend continues. Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 novel, The Historian, reveals the 15th century prince Vlad Tepes, aka the Impaler of Wallachia, aka the Real Dracula.

Folktales of the zombie, a corpse reanimated by a powerful sorcerer, arise from the Vodou belief system of the West African diaspora. WB Seabrook’s 1929 novel, The Magic Island, and Victor Halperin’s 1932 film, White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi, lifted the zombie from its original cultural context and made it a stock figure of the horror genre.

Vampires and zombies now rival each other for popularity in the current spate of Jane Austen-themed paranormals. Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies weds the Regency classic with zombie mayhem and armies of ninja zombie-slayers, while the title of Amanda Grange’s Mr. Darcy, Vampyre says it all.

Light years away from the Jane Austen industry, fantasy author Emma Bull has crafted the most unique of twists – a paranormal Western. Set in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, Bull’s novel, Territory, recasts the famous story of the shoot out at OK Corral as a supernatural battle ground: Wyatt Earp appears as a dark magician fighting over land rights in the mining boomtown.

Has genre-bending gone too far? Barbara Peters, no fan of the vampire-oeuvre, seems to think so. “I expect that like all hot genres it will play out and cycle down and something new will replace it.”

HNR editor Bethany Latham offers a different viewpoint. “Historical fiction provides a way to escape from reality, first and foremost into the past, and what’s more escapist than the supernatural, than fantasy? There will always be purists when it comes to any genre – those who don’t wish to see adventure taint their literary novels or the paranormal intrude on a prescribed historical setting. But many readers are finding that seamlessly combining the two into a single, well-written novel can make for some fascinating, transportive reading. I’m a perfect example; I'm not a fan of ‘fantasy’ per se, and my first reaction if asked would be to say I don’t read it. But then I’d remember how I greatly enjoyed both Kostova’s The Historian and Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, both of which fall into this category, and have to admit myself to be a liar. Works like this have encouraged me to broaden not only the horizons of what I put on my never-ending ‘to read’ list, but also what I consider to be good ‘historical fiction.’”

How to Make it Work

As Latham points out, any author hoping to weave supernatural elements into their historical fiction must find a way to make it appear seamless. The magic must arise organically from the historical setting and worldview. It must feel authentic rather than forced or anachronistic. A solid background in research is essential. Familiarize yourself with the literature of your era, be it folk tales, ballads, written sermons, or skaldic poetry. If you write a paranormal send up on a classic novel, know the original text inside out. Paranormal mash-ups such as Seth Grahame-Smith’s actually pay great homage to the integrity of Jane Austen’s writing, allowing Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy’s wit to shine through as they battle the zombie hordes.

“The best historical fiction,” Kathleen Kent believes, “is anchored firmly in fact, and so I researched The Heretic’s Daughter for several years, studying maps, court records and contemporary accounts, to give the story and the characters greater authenticity.”

Primary sources such as witch trial transcripts are a great source for discovering stories and characters. My own inspiration to write a novel about Elizabeth Southerns was inspired by the following quote from Thomas Potts’s A Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had
been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast
place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man
knowes. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no
man escaped her, or her Furies.

Reading against the grain, I was amazed at how Mother Demdike’s strength of character blazed forth in the document written to vilify her.

My research into the Pendle Witches also benefited from new scholarly research on historical cunning folk. Excellent secondary sources include Owen Davies’s Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History and Emma Wilby’s Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, both of which correct many misconceptions about historical magic practitioners. Keith Thomas’s classic, Religion and the Decline of Magic, is perhaps the best introduction to superstition and popular belief in Early Modern Britain.

Don’t chain yourself to your books and computer either. Being on location in places like Salem or the site of Greenland’s Viking settlements or Lisbon’s old Jewish quarter can add a whole other level of depth and authenticity to your writing.

Let the magic begin.

The Birth Machine by Elizabeth Baines

2010-10-08T02:27:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Baines's controversial book, THE BIRTH MACHINE, has just been re-issued. Be sure to check out this title, as well as Elizabeth's fabulous short fiction in the anthology, BITCH LIT, published by Crocus Books and co-edited by Maya Chowdhry and yours truly!

REBIRTH: LONG-AWAITED REISSUE OF ACCLAIMED NOVEL EXPOSING HI-TECH CHILDBIRTH

In ELIZABETH BAINES’S acclaimed novel, THE BIRTH MACHINE, Zelda lies on a hospital bed about to undergo hi-tech childbirth. But things don’t go to plan, and as her labour goes wrong and the drugs take over, the past blends with the present and fairytale and myth, and long-buried secrets and present-day betrayals are exposed…

On its first publication The Birth Machine was seized on by readers as giving voice to a female experience absent from fiction until then. It was acclaimed as a significant event in women’s publishing, also receiving critical praise, and quickly became a classic text. It was dramatized by Elizabeth and broadcast as an acclaimed play for Radio 4. In spite of this, and in part due to the fact that the author was at the centre of a women’s movement controversy, The Birth Machine fell out of print. It is now reissued with the author’s original structure (changed by the Women’s Press for political feminist reasons) reinstated and including an Author’s Note discussing the implications of the changes.

Still very relevant today to modern Obstetrics and Medicine, The Birth Machine is however more than that: it is also a gripping story involving a long-ago murder. Above all, it is a powerful novel about the ways we can wield power through logic and language, and about the battle over who owns the right to knowledge and the power to tell the stories of who we are.

'A gripping story, a pithy book' - Katy Campbell.
'An increasingly powerful narrative' - Time Literary Supplement.

The history of the publication of The Birth Machine can be read here.

The Author's Note can be read on Salt’s website
here.

The book can be purchased from Amazon here.

ELIZABETH BAINES is also the author of the novel Too Many Magpies and a collection of stories Balancing on the Edge of the World, both published by Salt.

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

2010-09-19T03:10:00.001-07:00

In the witch trials that raged across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, legal authorities strove to uncover evidence of a pact between the accused witch and the devil. But did this alleged pact ever exist except in the imaginations of the witchfinders?

The legend of Doctor Faustus captivated the public because it purported to reveal the story of real-life German magician, alchemist, and astronomer, Johann Georg Faust, who died in 1540. Rumour had it that his powers were given to him by the devil. His legend first appeared in print in a 1587 chapbook, Das Faustbuch, a cautionary tale of how the unbridled pursuit of knowledge can undermine religious salvation.

Inspired by this pamphlet, Christopher Marlowe (1554-1593) penned his masterpiece, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, the first surviving published copy of which is dated 1604. No simple moral tale, Marlowe's tragedy works on a number of levels.

Set in Wittenberg, Germany, the great humanistic centre of learning and the cradle of the Reformation, Marlowe's Faustus is a low born man who has become a respected Doctor of Philosophy at the university. But this is not enough. He would have absolute knowledge, absolute power. And so he turns to the dark arts. Casting a circle, he abjures the name of God and summons a demon, Mephistopheles. Under Mephistopheles's direction, Faustus then makes his pact with the devil, signing it in his own blood. He strikes a hard bargain. For twenty-four years, Faustus will do whatever he wants, with Mephistopheles as his obedient servant. When his time is up, Lucifer will summon Faustus to hell.

While the party lasts, Faustus lives it up. The middle of the play is full of schoolboy pranks. His horse is an enchanted hay bale which he sells to a hapless tavern keeper for fifty thalers. Mephistopheles spirits Faustus to the Vatican so that he can mock the pope and cardinals. When the pontiff and his men try to exorcise Faustus and his host of demons with bell, book, and candle, they find they cannot. In Marlowe's play, the pope is depicted as powerless to expel evil because he himself is corrupted and damned. Marlowe's own anti-Catholicism is well documented. While a student at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, he served as a government spy, infilitrating Catholic circles to uncover plots against Queen Elizabeth I.

At the Emperor's court, Faustus conjures Alexander the Great and his paramour. He even manages to conjure up the spirit of Helen of Troy.

Yet when all these merry japes are over, Faustus finds himself utterly alone and bereft, forced to face the full weight of his pact. Though he desperately seeks redemption, he never achieves it and so quietly resigns himself to his coffin where he awaits his damnation.

Moral interpretations of the play are complicated by the Protestant teachings of Marlowe's era that insisted it was impossible for the individual to save his or her own soul. Calvin preached the doctrine of predestination, namely that God had already determined who was damned and who was saved, without any reference to the person's virtue or deeds. Seen through this lens, Faustus is not damned because he sold his soul to the devil. No, he is a clever Renaissance man who strikes this bargain because he has already been damned by his own God; our hero wants to at least enjoy some pleasure and self-determination in this earthly life before his inevitable eternity in hell. In witnessing Faustus's yearning and failure to achieve redemption are we seeing the devastating implications of Calvinist dogma?

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was a sensation when it was first performed, scandalizing its audience by featuring forbidden acts of conjuration and blasphemy on stage.

Marlowe himself is a shadowy figure. In London, he kept the company of mathematicians, poets, and scientists, who gathered in a secret School of Night. Did Marlowe himself indulge in the dark arts? We will never know.

On May 30, 1593, the playwright, previously arrested on charges of brawling and duelling, became embroiled in a dispute with a tavern keeper over his bill. This escalated into a full blown knife fight, resulting in the playwright's death. He was twenty-nine years old.

Around this time, a note delivered to the authorities stated that Marlowe was an atheist who believed "that the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe." But it is impossible to judge the veracity of this claim. Marlowe the man remains as shrouded in mystery as the legendary Faustus himself.

It's interesting to contrast Marlowe's Faustus to the version by Goethe, the great German Romantic. Goethe, who studied philosophy, alchemy, mysticism, and natural magic, appeared to have felt a great deal of sympathy with Faustus. Instead of demonising him, he invites us to identify with his protagonist's tireless quest to understand the mysteries of existence. Significantly, Goethe's Faustus receives redemption. Angels carry him off to heaven before Mephistopheles can drag him down to hell.

Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre's production of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was absolutely magical, making maximum use of the circular stage to create the magic circle around which the audience hovers, as though we are spectral witnesses to Faustus's damnation.

This is no dry production but an enchanting pageant meant to capture the Elizabethan sense of awe at the magic taking place before us.

Lucifer (actor Gwendoline Christie) appears as a woman in glittering chainmail, who flies down from the ceiling on a trapeze. The actor appears to have great fun with her role, cackling and lounging on Faustus's desk while he mourns his doom and the impossibility of redemption.

A host of twenty four extras play the part of spirits, demons, and courtiers, mingling with the audience before descending on ladders onto the stage. Huge puppets appear as the host of Seven Deadly Sins. Faustus even engages in actual stage conjuring. But at the centre of it all is the powerful chemistry between Patrick O'Kane, who plays the volatile Faustus, and the quiet understatement of Ian Redford's Mephistopheles, who appears as an unassuming old man in a vicar's suit.

Ultimately the play is a powerful meditation on free will and the soul, and how willing people are to sacrifice their soul for fleeting ambition.

My husband, who saw the play with me, observed that in the modern corporate world, people sell their souls for a lot less than Doctor Faustus, who had least had some fun while the party lasted.

Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre's production of Doctor Faustus runs until October 9.

Dr. Naomi Baker's essay on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Lammas-tide and Harvest Home

2010-08-01T06:18:00.001-07:00

August 1 marks the beginning of the grain harvest in Britain, a period of intense labour and also celebration. In our age of convenience foods perhaps it's hard to imagine how important the harvest was in centuries past. The harvest could be poor, or fail entirely. If a community suffered two bad harvests in a row, entire families would starve.

The word "Lammas" derives from the Anglo-Saxon "hlaef-mass" or loaf mass. The first grain of the year would be reaped and then baked into a bread, which was consecrated in the church upon the first Sunday of August. A number of researchers have speculated that the origins of Lammas may be connected to the pre-Christian Irish celebration of Lughnasad. I highly recommend Waverly Fitzgerald's fascinating essay on the subject.

17th century poet, Robert Herrick offers us a window into how the Harvest Home was celebrated in his day.

THE HOCK-CART OR HARVEST HOME.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE MILDMAY,
EARL OF WESTMORELAND.

by Robert Herrick

COME, sons of summer, by whose toil
We are the lords of wine and oil :
By whose tough labours, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crowned with the ears of corn, now come,
And to the pipe sing harvest home.
Come forth, my lord, and see the cart
Dressed up with all the country art :
See here a maukin, there a sheet,
As spotless pure as it is sweet :
The horses, mares, and frisking fillies,
Clad all in linen white as lilies.
The harvest swains and wenches bound
For joy, to see the hock-cart crowned.
About the cart, hear how the rout
Of rural younglings raise the shout ;
Pressing before, some coming after,
Those with a shout, and these with laughter.
Some bless the cart, some kiss the sheaves,
Some prank them up with oaken leaves :
Some cross the fill-horse, some with great
Devotion stroke the home-borne wheat :
While other rustics, less attent
To prayers than to merriment,
Run after with their breeches rent.
Well, on, brave boys, to your lord's hearth,
Glitt'ring with fire, where, for your mirth,
Ye shall see first the large and chief
Foundation of your feast, fat beef :
With upper stories, mutton, veal
And bacon (which makes full the meal),
With sev'ral dishes standing by,
As here a custard, there a pie,
And here all-tempting frumenty.
And for to make the merry cheer,
If smirking wine be wanting here,
There's that which drowns all care, stout beer ;
Which freely drink to your lord's health,
Then to the plough, the commonwealth,
Next to your flails, your fans, your fats,
Then to the maids with wheaten hats ;
To the rough sickle, and crook'd scythe,
Drink, frolic, boys, till all be blithe.
Feed, and grow fat ; and as ye eat
Be mindful that the lab'ring neat,
As you, may have their fill of meat.
And know, besides, ye must revoke
The patient ox unto the yoke,
And all go back unto the plough
And harrow, though they're hanged up now.
And, you must know, your lord's word's true,
Feed him ye must, whose food fills you ;
And that this pleasure is like rain,
Not sent ye for to drown your pain,
But for to make it spring again.

---
Maukin, a cloth.
Fill-horse, shaft-horse.
Frumenty, wheat boiled in milk.
Fats, vats.

Herrick's portrayal of Harvest Home reveals no religious feast centered around the church, but a feudal tradtion in which peasants toil to harvest their overlord's grain. A decorated cart carries the last load of grain from the fields, forming the front of a secular procession followed by reapers crowned in grain and a piper playing a harvest song. The lord rewards his workers with a feast featuring plenty of meat (a rare treat for the labouring classes) and beer. After first toasting the landowner, the merry company toasts the "maids with wheaten hats." Just who were these maidens?

In his book, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Robert Hutton wonders if Herrick's maids with wheaten hats were young women crowned in chaplets of wheat and flowers as Harvest Queens, or if they were decorated Corn Dollies--sheaves of wheat decorated to look like maidens.

In 1598, the German traveller Paul Hentzer observed the following scene in Windsor:

We happened to meet some country people celebrating their Harvest home; their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which perhaps they would signify Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maidservants, riding through the streets in a cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.

Although Herrick's poems contains an admonition against excess merriment, lewdness, and drunkenness, some landlords went out of their way to make the harvest celebratory for their reapers. Ronald Hutton mentions Sir Patricius Curwen of Workington in Cumberland, a landlord of such largess that, in each year between 1628 and 1643, he not only paid his harvesters with food and wages but provided a piper to play in the fields for the nine to seventeen days that the grain harvest required.

Guest Post: History's Black Widow

2010-06-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

This week I'd like to present a guest post by C W Gortner, author of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici. Many of you already know Gortner from his previous novel, The Last Queen, which presents a sensitive portrait of the tragically misunderstood Juana "La Loca" of Castile. Gortner has passionately rewritten the histories of these maligned women, giving them voice and allowing them to tell their stories and set the record straight. And you never know . . . he might eventually write about a 17th century Firebrand.
-Mary Sharratt

History’s Black Widow: The Legend of Catherine de Medici

Catherine de Medici is known as the evil queen who masterminded a massacre. Or so the legend says. In truth, Catherine has been the target of a smear campaign that began in her lifetime and culminated with Alexander Dumas’s famous depiction of her in his novel La Reine Margot. Dumas exalted the queen we love to hate and enshrined her as history’s black widow.

Of Italian birth, Catherine came to France as a teenager to wed Henri II. To this day, she is not considered French; her background as a Medici made her a parvenu and prejudice against her because of her nationality haunted her throughout her life. Italians were despised as experts in the black arts; Catherine’s natural inclination toward her fellow countrymen was thus often used against her.

One of the greatest misconceptions is that Catherine nurtured a “passion for power”—another Italian trait. Though not raised to rule, she became regent for her sons in a kingdom torn apart by war. Her alleged ambition was in fact an effort to defend her adopted realm. While she made serious errors, she was usually motivated by the urgency to salvage a crisis than any cold-blooded urge to her foes.

In the end, she is best revealed by her own words: “It is great suffering to be always fearful.”

Thank you so much for spending this time with me. To find out more about The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, please visit: www.cwgortner.com

Corpus Christi Carol

2010-06-03T04:02:00.000-07:00

This haunting medieval carol seemed appropriate for today. There is definitely a mystery hidden in this song.

Corpus Christi Carol

Lulley, lully, lulley, lully,
The faucon hath born my mak away.

He bare hym up, he bare hym down,
He bare hym into an orchard brown.

In that orchard ther was an hall,
That was hanged with purpill and pall.

And in that hall ther was a bede,
Hit was hangid with gold so rede.

And yn that bede ther lythe a knyght,
His wowndes bledyng day and nyght.

By that bedes side ther kneleth a may,
And she wepeth both nyght and day.

And by that bedes side ther stondith a ston,
"Corpus Christi" wretyn theron.

Glossary
faucon: falcon
mak: mate, love
bare: bore, carried
purpill: purple (the royal color)
pall: a funeral pall, a cloth spread over a coffin
bede: bed
rede: red
lythe: lieth, lies
wowndes: wounds
bledyng: bleeding
kneleth: kneeleth, kneels
may: maid, maiden
wepeth: weepeth, weeps
stondith: standeth, stands
ston: stone
Corpus Christi: body of Christ (Latin)
wretyn: written

Interview with Katherine Howe!

2010-06-02T06:22:00.000-07:00

This interview is published on Amazon.com.

Katherine Howe is the bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and a descendant of both Elizabeth Proctor, who survived the Salem witch trials, and Elizabeth Howe, who did not. Read her interview with Mary Sharratt, author of Daughters of the Witching Hill:

Katherine Howe: I am so looking forward to learning more about Daughters of the Witching Hill. As I started the book, I was curious about something. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane covers some well-worn territory in American history: the Salem witch trials, which we all learn about in school so early that it's hard to really know when they appear for the first time in our culture. Can the same be said for the Pendle witches in British history? If so, how did you feel about revisiting something already so well known? And if not, how did you first learn about them?

Mary Sharratt: It's so wonderful to be doing this interview with you. I'm such a fan of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane!

Unlike the Salem Trials which are so well known that they've become almost a part of the American psyche, I wouldn't say that the Pendle Witches are that well known outside the Pendle region. I think many people in other parts of England might find them as unfamiliar as Americans would. The most famous English witch trials would be those associated with Matthew Hopkins’s career as a witchfinder during the anarchy that ensued during the English Civil War.

So, although the Pendle Witch Trials were meticulously documented by court clerk Thomas Potts in his book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, I'd say that they are not so well known. Novels and academic studies have been written about them, of course, but not so many that I felt like I was treading on over-familiar ground.

KH: I am not surprised to hear that the Pendle witches are a bit more obscure than Matthew Hopkins' witches. How did you first stumble upon this mysterious history in your area?

MS: When I first moved to the Pendle region in 2002, I hadn't heard anything about the Pendle Witches, but once you are in the region, it's impossible to ignore this history. There are images of witches everywhere: on private houses, pubs, bumper stickers, walking trail signs, realtors' logos, a whole fleet of commuter buses going into Manchester.

At first I thought these witches belonged to the realm of fairy tale and folklore, but once I learned the actual history, I was so moved by their story. Seven women and two men from this region were hanged for witchcraft at Lancaster in 1612, but the most notorious among them, Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, the heroine of my book, died in prison before she came to trial. She was a cunning woman and healer of long-standing repute who had practiced her craft for decades before anyone dared to interfere with her or stand in her way. Another accused witch, Mother Chattox, was also a renowned cunning woman--Mother Demdike's rival. Alizon Device, Demdike's granddaughter, was first to be arrested and last to be tried at Lancaster. Her last recorded words before she was hanged were a passionate vindication of her grandmother's legacy as a healer.

What moved me was not only the family loyalty but the fact that these women believed in their own powers and made no attempt to hide who they were when interrogated by their magistrate. They seemed very proud of their perceived powers.

KH: I was particularly intrigued by your representation of the relationship between the cunning folk tradition in late Medieval and early modern England with the loss of the Catholic faith and its mysteries. In effect it seems as though Demdike and her family are merely adherents of what the book calls the "old religion," though the story is often agnostic on whether that term refers to Catholicism or to something pre-Christian. I gather that some of that representation draws on the work of Keith Thomas, a historian whose work I relied on for research as well, though I was trying to uncover ways in which the cunning folk tradition might have persisted even for adherents of Puritanism. Can you tell me about some of the other research that you did to really root the story in historical truth?

MS: I based all the major events and details on the primary source material, Thomas Potts's The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. Here you can see the accused witches' charms quoted by the prosecution and cited as damning evidence of satanic witchcraft. However, the charms contain not a shred of diabolical imagery. They are Catholic prayer charms. The charm to heal a person who is bewitched, attributed to Mother Demdike's family, is a moving description of the passion of Christ as witnessed by the charm contains language very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm discussed in Eamon Duffy's landmark work, Stripping the Altars: Traditional Religion in England: 1400-1580. So the Catholic connection is based on fact and this was one of the things that surprised me most in my research, because I hadn't even considered such a connection.

Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic was hugely influential to my writing, but my research also draws on a course I did at Lancaster University on Late Medieval Belief and Superstition. There was much mysticism and mystery associated the pre-Reformation Catholicism and indeed the yearly round of village holidays took place under the blessing of the old Church, even festivals we associate as pagan, such as May Day, were adopted or appropriated, depending on one's viewpoint. So, pre-Reformation, one could be a mainstream Christian and still embrace a worldview that made room for positive folk magic. It was believed that certain prayers could aid healing. Mother Chattox's charm to heal a bewitched person, for example, involves saying five Pater Nosters, five Ave Marias, and the Creed, while picturing the five wounds of Christ. You could pray to a certain saint or visit a holy well, and so on. Puritanism stripped all these blessings away, yet people still faced the same harsh fears of the evil supernatural, but no longer had the "good" charms to protect them. So it's no wonder that older people like Mother Demdike, who would have remembered the old Church, clung on to these prayers and healing charms.

On the other hand, the belief in familiar spirits, which was the foundation of English folk magic, seemed to draw on a faith quite different from Christianity. It's difficult to substantiate that historical witches and cunning folk believed in anything like modern Wicca, but the lingering belief in fairies and elves in this period is well established, and I followed the theory advanced by people like Emma Wilby, author of the scholarly study Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, that the belief in familiar spirits was intimately connected with this lingering fairy faith, something that co-existed for centuries with Christianity. In his 1677 book, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster talks about a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself.

KH: Just a quick last question: One of the most common questions that readers ask me is whether or not writing about witches has made me more superstitious. So now I would like to ask you the same thing: has writing about witches made you see the world differently? And do you think lungwort will grow well in a New England garden, as you have now inspired me to try?

MS: Katherine, writing this book was such a magical experience for me. I identified with my heroines, Mother Demdike and Alizon, to the point where I "heard" their voices as I was writing their story--or letting them tell their own stories through me. I felt a powerful connection with the land and with these women whose spirit lives on in the land. I can't just walk down a country lane or footpath again without feeling that connection to every herb and tree and animal that crosses my path. And I find myself counting magpies.

You could always try planting lungwort and let me know how it grows!

(Photo © Laura Dandaneau)

The English woodland in May

2010-05-10T02:21:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I went walking in Marles Wood near Ribchester to see the bluebells.

We also saw some very interactive cows.

And here is the view of Pendle Hill.

Happy Mother's Day

2010-05-09T04:11:00.000-07:00

DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL is a novel that celebrates strong mothers and daughters.

Mother Demdike, the most notorious of the Pendle Witches of 1612, had the most infamous reputation. Before her arrest on witchcraft charges at the age of eighty, she had worked as a cunning woman and healer for decades, training both her daughter, Elizabeth Device, and her granddaughter, Alizon Device, in her craft.

This is what court clerk Thomas Potts had to say about Mother Demdike in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knowes. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Not bad for an eigty-year-old lady! I believe that Mother Demdike was so frightening to her foes because she was a woman who embraced her powers wholeheartedly. Strong women are scary.

What intrigued me is that although she died in prison before she could come to trial, Potts pays a great deal of attention to her, going out of his way to convince his readers that she was a dangerous witch of untold powers. Reading the trial transcripts against the grain, I was amazed at how Bess’s strength of character blazed forth in the document written expressly to vilify her.

Bess freely admitted to being a healer and a cunning woman. Her neighbours called on her to cure their children and their cattle.

In contrast her granddaughter Alizon, who appeared to be a teenager at the time of her trial, seemed to view her own powers with a mixture of bewilderment and terror. Her misadventures in struggling to come to terms with this troubling birthright unleashed the tragedy which led to her arrest and the downfall of her entire family. Although the first to be accused of witchcraft, Alizon was the last to be tried at Lancaster. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged were a passionate vindication of her grandmother’s legacy as a healer.

What wisdom would Mother Demdike pass on to mothers and daughters of our time? Seize your power while you can, for the tide can turn so quickly, especially when shifting political currents encourage those who monger any kind of witch hunt. Treasure your power. Use it wisely. There’s much blessing to be found there. Don’t turn away or deny it or flee from it. The refusal of the call only leads to tragedy. Embrace your power and be true to yourself.

Eldritch Goings On: Saint Mark's Eve

2010-05-09T01:41:00.001-07:00

Saint Mary's Church in Newchurch in Pendle, as spooky a place as any to hold the Vigil of the Eve of Saint Mark.

One of the most intriguing English superstitions was the Vigil of the Eve of Saint Mark. Those of gothic sensibilities take note.

On April 24, the night before the feast day of Saint Mark the Evangelist, the morbidly curious gathered on the church porch between the hours of 11:00 pm and 1:00 am, in hope of seeing the ghosts of all who would die and be buried in the churchyard that coming year. It was believed that those who would die earlier in that year appeared first, following by those who would die later in the year.

Robert Chambers (1802-1871), prolific writer of reference books, recorded this lore in his massive encyclopaedia, Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, now accessible online.

Chambers cites an account written by Gervase Hollis, colonel to Charles I. Hollis professed to have heard the tale from a minister, Liveman Rampaine, the household chaplain to Sir Thomas Munson, of Burton in Lincoln.

In the year 1631, two men (inhabitants of Burton) agreed betwixt themselves upon St. Mark's eve at night to watch in the churchyard at Burton, to try whether or no (according to the ordinary belief amongst the common people) they should see the Spectra, or Phantasma of those persons which should die in that parish the year following. To this intent, having first performed the usual ceremonies and superstitions, late in the night, the moon shining then very bright, they repaired to the church porch, and there seated themselves, continuing there till near twelve of the clock. About which time (growing weary with expectation and partly with fear) they resolved to depart, but were held fast by a kind of insensible violence, not being able to move a foot.

About midnight, upon a sudden (as if the moon had been eclipsed), they were environed with a black darkness; immediately after, a kind of light, as if it had been a resultancy from torches. Then appears, coming towards the church porch, the minister of the place, with a book in his hand, and after him one in a winding-sheet, whom they both knew to resemble one of their neighbours. The church doors immediately fly open, and through pass the apparitions, and then the doors clap to again. Then they seem to hear a muttering, as if it were the burial service, with a rattling of bones and noise of earth, as in the filling up of a grave. Suddenly a still silence, and immediately after the apparition of the curate again, with another of their neighbours following in a winding-sheet, and so a third, fourth, and fifth, every one attended with the same circumstances as the first.
These all having passed away, there ensued a serenity of the sky, the moon shining bright, as at the first; they themselves being restored to their former liberty to walk away, which they did sufficiently affrighted. The next day they kept within doors, and met not together, being both of them exceedingly ill, by reason of the affrightment which had terrified them the night before.

The manuscript goes on to explain how the men did indeed claim to witness the deaths occurring in their community, including that of an infant newly born. These traditions were most prevalent in the North and West of England, and it was believed that, before the vigil, watchers should fast and circle around the church before taking up position.

John Keats’s poem, The Eve of Saint Mark, delves into this folklore.

Daughters of the Witching Hill Reader Review Contest

2010-03-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

Win signed copies of all my books, plus an exclusive handmade piece of jewelry designed by Elise Mattheson.

How to enter:

1. Post your Insightful Reader Review of Daughters of the Witching Hill on one of the following online review sites:

Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk,
Barnesandnoble.com,
Borders.com, or
Powells.com

Then sign my guest book telling me about your review.

Entries must be posted by May 7, 2010.

Happy Reading!

Pendle Witch Library

2010-03-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Pendle Witches: Further Reading on the Pendle Witches, Historical Cunning Folk, and Wisewomen

Fiction:

Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (EJ Morten) (First published in 1849, written in dialect, very long, gothic, and dense.)

Robert Neill, Mist Over Pendle (A lovely novel for both adults and young adults but not very kind to the witches!)

Nonfiction, Primary Source:

Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (Published in 1613, these are the official transcripts of the 1612 trial. Though not infallible, Potts’s account remains the best primary source we have.)

Nonfiction, Secondary Sources:

John A. Clayton, The Lancashire Witch Conspiracy (Barrowford) (A locally published historical investigation.)

Jonathan Lumby, The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Carnegie) (Very in-depth and sensitively written.)

Edgar Peel & Pat Southern, The Trials of the Lancashire Witches (Nelson) (Perhaps the most lucid overview of the arrests and trials.)

Robert Poole, ed., The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester University Press) (A collection of recent academic scholarship on the subject, highly recommended!)

Nonfiction: Books on Witchcraft, Folk Magic, Folk Lore, Religion, and Social History

Robin Briggs, Witches & Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, (Blackwell Publishing) (General overview of the European witch persecutions.)

Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, (Hambledon Continuum) (Although most of the cunning-folk he discusses date from a later period than the Pendle Witches, this is still a must-read.)

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale University Press) (Seminal work on why people in Tudor England were so reluctant to lose their “old religion.”)

John Harland & T.T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folklore, (Kessinger Publishing) (Originally compiled in the 19th century, this book is full of authentic folk magic as practised by local cunning folk.)

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, (Penguin) (The classic social history on religion and popular folk magic and how they influenced each other.)

John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, (Ams Pr Inc), (Originally published in 1677, this is a skeptical work dismissing accusations of supposed satanic witchcraft and yet illuminating genuine folkloric beliefs and practises, including the lingering belief in the Fairy Faith.)

Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, (Sussex Academic Press) (Scholarly work attempting to elucidate what cunning folk actually believed in. The author presents a convincing argument that the belief in familiar spirits was rooted in the Fairy Faith.)

The Charms of the Pendle Witches

2010-03-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

From Thomas Potts’s A Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, the official trial transcripts:

Mother Demdike’s family charm “to get drink”:

Crucifixus hoc signum vitam
Eternam. Amen.

(Literal translation: the crucifix is the sign of eternal life.)

This charm to cure bewitchment is attributed to Chattox:

A Charme

Three Biters hast thou bitten,
The Hart, ill Eye, ill Tonge:
Three bitter shall be thy Boote,
Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost
a Gods name,
Fiue Pater-nosters, fiue Auies,
and a Creede,
In worship of fiue wounds
of our Lord.

(In modern language the last part would read: five Pater-Nosters, five Ave Marias, and a Creed, in the worship of the five wounds of our Lord—the cunning woman would then say these prayers while contemplating the five wounds of Christ.)

A charm to cure one who is bewitched, attributed to Elizabeth Southerns’s family and recorded by Thomas Potts during the 1612 witch trials at Lancaster:

A Charme

Upon Good-Friday, I will fast while I may
Untill I heare them knell
Our Lords owne Bell,
Lord in his messe
With his twelve Apostles good,
What hath he in his hand
Ligh in leath wand:
What hath he in his other hand?
Heavens doore key,
Open, open Heaven doore keyes,
Steck, steck hell doore.
Let Crizum child
Goe to it Mother mild,
What is yonder that casts a light so farrandly,
Mine owne deare Sonne that’s naild to the Tree.
He is naild sore by the heart and hand,
And holy harne Panne,
Well is that man
That Fryday spell can
His Childe to learne;
A Cross of Blew, and another of Red,
As good Lord was to the Roode.
Gabriel laid him downe to sleepe
Upon the ground of holy weepe:
Good Lord came walking by,
Sleep’st thou, wak’st thou Gabriel,
No Lord I am sted with sticke and stake,
That I can neither sleepe nor wake:
Rise up Gabriel and goe with me,
The stick nor the stake shall never deere thee.

Daughters of the Witching Hill: What the critics are saying

2010-03-30T06:04:00.001-07:00

Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt
published April 7, 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

“Gorgeously imagined . . . . Sharratt crafts her complex yet credible account by seamlessly blending historical fact, modern psychology, and vivid evocations of the daily life of the poor whose only hope of empowerment lay in the black arts.”
-Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review

“What makes this story stand out are the strong voices of the two main characters, stalwart Bess Southerns (aka Demdike) and her feisty granddaughter Alizon Device . . . . a fascinating tale. The story unfolds without melodrama and is therefore all the more powerful.”
-Library Journal, Starred Review

“The Pendle witches’ story, retold as a passionate saga of female friendship.”
-Kirkus Reviews

“Sharratt fills the book with fascinating accounts of rituals and magic practices, and her gift for the language of the era brings the narrative to life. Striking just the right balance between the demands of fact and the allure of a good story, she has produced a novel that’s both convincing and compelling. Daughters is—literally—a spellbinding book.”
-Bookpage

"Sharratt gives the story a sense of magical wonder as she weaves 17th century folklore into the hard lives of her characters."
-Mary Ann Grossmann, Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Daughters of the Witching Hill: The Launch Party

2010-03-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

Daughters of the Witching Hill
published April 7 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What a voice Mary Sharratt has. She brings a haunting, ancient story to life.
--Karleen Koen

The wild, brooding landscape of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, Northern England, my home for the past seven years, gave birth to my new novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, which reveals the true and unforgettable story of the Pendle Witches of 1612.

Take a sneak peak of the novel

Who were the Pendle Witches of 1612?

Read what the critics are saying

Join me on my traditional and virtual book tour

Watch my docudrama of the Pendle Witches, filmed live on location around Pendle Hill

Read Mary Ann Grossmann's interview with me in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Learn the charms of the Pendle Witches

Enter the Daughters of the Witching Hill Reader Review Contest

Learn more about Historical Cunning Folk and Wisewomen

Thank you for being a part of this book!

New video, live events, audio rights, and new reviews

2010-03-23T05:52:00.001-07:00

I've just returned from New York and the stellar Virginia Book Fesitval.

In Brooklyn, artist and author Kris Waldherr hosted my exclusive prepublication reading and signing at her Art & Words Gallery, pictured above. You can see some of her gorgeous art work on the wall behind me. You can also see how beautiful the finished book jacket for DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL is. It shimmers like a hologram and completely conveys the essence of the magic I sought to capture in the novel.

The event was livestreamed on the internet and you can see it here.

At the Virginia Festival of the Book I had the honour of being on three panels.

First, I was a guest speaker for Bella Stander's Book Promotion 101 seminar at Writer House in Charlottesville.

Then I was lucky enough to take part in the divine Barbara Drummond Mead's Reading Group Choices Panel with authors Masha Hamilton, Sheila Curran, and Laura Brodie.

I have to read all their books now.

Ditto with the authors of the third panel, Larry Baker's True Stories of Fact or Fiction panel with Roger Ekirch, Ben Farmer, and C.M. Mayo. Ben Farmer is only 28 and this was his first public book event. His debut novel EVANGELINE looks so compelling. I had a wonderful chat with C.M. Mayo who lives in Mexico and writes great fiction about Mexico's turbulent history.

In early April I leave for book tour with dates in Boston, Salem, and Minnesota where I hope to meet with my lovely readers!

Here is the video docudrama we shot for DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL, on location around Pendle Hill. My publisher has now added the book jacket and pub date to the video. In this short film, I discuss my research on the Pendle Witches as historical cunning folk.

In addition, DAUGHTERS has received a rave review from Bookpage. As I post this, their site seems to be down but the link should work when their site is back up.

And insightful reviews from Goddess Pages and Pagan Book Reviews.

My other great news is that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sold the audio rights to both DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL and THE VANISHING POINT, and that my publicist told me that the rave March 1 review from Library Journal was actually a Starred Review. So that means that DAUGHTERS received two Starred Reviews, one from Publisher's Weekly and one from Library Journal.

My heroines, the Pendle Witches, were real people so I sincerely hope that this book can serve their memory and do justice to their legacy. Their story deserves to be heard.

King James I: Royal Demonologist

2010-03-10T03:15:00.000-08:00

Even by the standards of his age, King James VI of Scotland, who later became James I of England, stood out as a deeply superstitious man, ruled by his obsession with the occult.

Before his reign, witchcraft persecutions had been rare in Britain. But that all changed in 1590 when James personally oversaw the trials by torture for around seventy individuals implicated in the North Berwick Witch Trials, the biggest Scotland had known. The witches’ alleged crime? Raising a storm which nearly sank James’s ship when he sailed home from Norway with his new bride, Anne of Denmark. Possibly dozens of accused witches were executed by burning at the stake, although the precise number is unknown.

In 1597 James published his book, Daemonologie, his rebuttal of Reginald Scot’s skeptical work, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, which questioned the very existence of witches. Daemonologie was an alarmist book, presenting the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation.

In 1604, only one year after James ascended to the English throne, he passed his new Witchcraft Act, which made invoking spirits a crime punishable by execution.

James’s ideas on witchcraft were later popularised by Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, which had its premier performance at James’s court in 1606. For the first time in history, English drama depicted witches gathering in secret for their own malign rituals and scheming.

The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters by the sea and land,
Thus do go, about, about,
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace, the charm's wound up.
(Macbeth, I,iii, 32-37)

According to Instruments of Darkness by James Sharpe, this terror of supposed witch covens was the driving factor mobilising 17th century witch hunts. Previously the belief in witches’ covens had been a Continental European concept, foreign to traditional British folk magic, practised by individuals, not collectives. No evidence exists that supposed witches in Early Modern Britain organised themselves into collectives, and nothing of the black mass can be traced to England at this time.

It wouldn't take long before life began to imitate James's and Shakespeare's dark fiction.

Six years on, in 1612, the King’s paranoid fantasy of satanic conspiracy, planted in the minds of local magistrates hoping to earn his favour, culminated in one of the key manifestations of the Jacobean witch-craze: the trials of the Lancashire Witches of Pendle, which resulted in the execution of seven women and two men. According to Thomas Potts's The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, the official trial transcripts, the accused allegedly gathered "according to solemn appointment" at Malkin Tower on Good Friday, "with great cheer, merry company and much conference," and then plotted to blow up Lancaster Castle with gunpowder. As far-fetched as this scenario seems--where would a group of impoverished commonfolk even get hold of gunpowder--it fed directly into James' fears following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

James’s unfortunate legacy extends even into our age. The King James Bible, completed in 1611, saw the scriptures rewritten to further the King’s agenda. Exodus 22:18, originally translated as, “Thou must not suffer a poisoner to live,” became “Thou must not suffer a witch to live.”

Speaking of the Pendle Witches, local preparations for commemorating the 400th anniversary of the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials are underway. Read more about it here.

On making the 17th century book video

2010-01-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

An increasing number of authors are creating video trailers to promote their books. Historical fiction gives an added depth and flavour to the process, a chance to show off your period garb or highlight the elements of history that your book draws out.

I was very fortunate that my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, arranged for me to create such a trailer for my forthcoming novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill. The history of the Pendle Witches is so rich in its own right, it's just crying out to be filmed.

My marketing director arranged for me to work with London filmmaker Callum Macrae of Outsider Television. Callum is a seasoned veteran who has filmed in war zones, done documentaries, and worked for programmes such as Panorama. He has also recently started doing "Lit Vids"--literary videos. Here is a link to the trailer he did for Tom Levenson's nonfiction book, Newton and the Counterfeiter.

First, Callum and I worked out a draft script by email. Callum had many brilliant ideas. What we ended up aiming for was something quite ambitious--more like a mini-docudrama than the typical promotional video.

Callum drove up on a Thursday with his assistant camera woman, the beautiful and brilliant Livvy Haydock. The first day we discussed the script while driving around various locations in the Pendle region. The rugged landscape proved to be as indispensible for the filming as it was for the actual storytelling. You could just picture the characters emerging from the misty moorland.

We shot on location at my stables with scenes of me on horseback since riding my horse around the Pendle region was such an instrumental part of my creative process. I had considered riding in costume, but, alas, I never learned to ride side-saddle. Callum actually thought it was better that I just ride as Mary in the twenty-first-century, and so that's what I did, less-than-flattering-riding-helmet and all. Booshka, my Welsh Section D mare, was impeccably well-behaved, even though she couldn't understand why we wanted her to keep walking back and forth over and over again in front of the camera for over half an hour.

I had never realised how many "takes" you need to get a scene just right.

After Miss Boo got her treats and was turned out to play in the field with her friends, we drove on to Malkin Tower Farm, where the owners, Rachel and Andrew Turner, gave us a warm welcome and showed us what are believed to be the ruined foundations of what was once Malkin Tower, home to my protagonist Mother Demdike and three generations of her family.

Malkin Tower Farm has a number of lovely, inviting holiday cottages in an area of outstanding natural beauty. If you ever visit Pendle, it's the perfect place to stay. They welcome walkers and cyclists, and have two very friendly and engaging dogs.

I crouched down near the stones, explaining their significance to the camera, while camera assistant Livvy donned historical costume and did a sequence in the background, walking down the steep slope around the ruins, as Mother Demdike's granddaughter, Alizon Device. Callum filmed another sequence of Livvy as Alizon walking through gnarled winter trees. With her long blond hair and porcelain skin (she wore no make up for the filming), Livvy was hauntingly perfect as Alizon.

Since we were so pressed for time, having to do all the filming on one day in the fleeting winter daylight, we put the historical costumes on over our modern clothes. So, in the costume sequences, I was wearing a long skirt over my riding breeches and tall boots. In the non-costume sequences, I wore my 17th century bodice and chemise-like blouse and corset under my winter jacket. I spent the entire day in my corset, rode my horse in my corset, even mucked out in my corset. How is that for historical authenticity?

After Malkin Tower Farm, we drove on to the old quarry outside the village in Newchurch in Pendle. It was while walking past this quarry at daylight gate--twilight in the local dialect--that Mother Demdike, called Bess in my novel, first met Tibb, her familiar spirit. In traditional English folk magic, no cunning woman could work her spells without a familiar, or otherworldly ally. So the day she met Tibb was really the turning point of her life, when she first came into her powers. A fanciful Victorian stonemason carved a man's head on the quarry stone to commemorate the legends of Tibb.

In the quarry I discussed all this for the camera before changing into costume and reciting an excerpt from the novel, in character as Mother Demdike, describing the moment when she first met her familiar spirit, who appeared to her in the guise of a beautiful young man. Callum wanting me speaking, not reading, so I had to learn all the passages by heart.

The light in the quarry kept changing dramatically. At once point we were enveloped in dense fog before it lifted to dazzling evening sunlight. Then, off down the valley, mist lifted off the damp green fields like plumes of rising smoke.

By the time we finished the filming, daylight gate was closing. It was getting dark and we'd finished filming all the outdoor sequences just in the nick of time.

We drove back to the stable where we turned an empty stall into a witch's cottage with dried herbs hanging on the wall, an old fashioned willow broom, candles, and even sheep skulls for ambiance. Callum also had a smoke machine going to create an eerie atmosphere.

Our props included facsimile editions of the two historical books my novel draws on as primary sources, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witchcraft in the Countie of Lancaster, by Thomas Potts, the official transcripts of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trial, and Daemonologie, written by King James I, a witch-hunter's handbook that his magistrates were expected to read. I found jpegs of the original, historical title pages of these documents on the internet and then Callum printed them out at home and treated them with tea stains and coffee grounds until they resembled yellowing, crumbling old manuscript pages.

In our "witch's cottage," I discussed the significance of the historical documents and then recited some more passages from the novel, in costume and in character as Mother Demdike. My chosen excerpt was from the opening of the novel, when Mother Demdike, her daughter Liza, and granddaughter Alizon confront churchwarden Richard Baldwin who has refused to pay Liza for the work she's done carding wool for him. According to the primary sources, Baldwin tried to drive the women away with a horse whip, calling them whores and witches. He is recorded as saying, "I will burn the one of you and hang the other."

To punctuate these scenes of conflict between Mother Demdike and the authorities, we used a braided leather whip, purchased from a London joke shop. Callum cracked the whip on the floor while Livvy filmed close up shots.

I was worried that the noise might spook the horse in the next stall, so I went out to check. The horse in question merely nuzzled my pockets for treats, so he didn't seem too traumatised.

A dog club was meeting at the stable grounds that night, so our audio takes had the odd bark and howl in the background which added to the aura of mystery.

We weren't finished at the stable until nearly 9:00 at night, by which time the fog outside was so thick, it made the smoke machine redundant.

Back at my home, we finished the voiceover takes.

I can hardly wait to see the finished product, which Callum and Livvy will edit. After the publisher has approved it, the short film should go live on sites like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Watch this space.

Pendle Witch photo album

2009-12-07T03:58:00.001-08:00

Some beautiful scenery for inspiration in this cold and dark time of year!

This is the view of Pendle Hill taken from the back of my house, taken in May 2009.

My mare Boushka adorned on Midsummer's Day, 2009. My equine muse makes a cameo appearance in my new novel, DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL, as Alice Nutter's horse.

Stanfield Tower on Blacko Hill. This tower is a Victorian folly not far from the site of Malkin Tower, my heroine Mother Demdike's home. Malkin Tower no longer exists, unfortunately.

Modern outbuilding in West Close, near Fence. Mother Demdike's friend and rival, Mother Chattox, lived in a cottage near this site. Alas, her home no longer exists either.

St. Mary's Church, Newchurch, in Pendle. The village is named after the church, which was built in the mid-16th century.

If you look closely, you can see the image of the eye on the church tower, possibly intended to ward against witchcraft and evil. Some believe that Alice Nutter was buried in this churchyard, although it is unlikely.

Image of a witch on a private home in Roughlee Village, not far from Roughlee Hall, possibly the home of Alice Nutter, although some argue that she lived at Crow Trees Farm, also very close to where this photo was taken.

You see these images of witches everywhere in Pendle. It freaks some visitors out! And sometimes it makes it hard to remember that the Pendle Witches weren't folkloric figures but real women and men who lost their lives on account of ignorance and hysteria.

Closing on a more uplifting note:

A blooming hawthorn tree in a wild meadow.

Author spotlight: Erika Mailman

2009-11-18T05:13:00.000-08:00

Erika Mailman's novel, The Witch's Trinity, is set in a remote German village in 1507. Guede Mueller's world falls apart when her daughter-in-law accuses her of witchcraft. Guede plunges into a world of frightening visions, not knowing what to believe.

Mary Sharratt: What inspired you write about historical witches?

Erika Mailman: I have long been fascinated by the witchcraft persecutions of the past, both in the U.S. and Europe. I'm not sure why the topic so compelled me, but as a child I read everything I could get my hands on and can still remember a few library books that completely unnerved me. When it came time to write my novel, I withheld my research until I had written the bare bones of the story, and found that what I'd read as a child had stuck with me somehow even though I didn't consciously realize it--oftentimes, I'd come across a nonfiction witchcraft source that completely mirrored something I thought I'd been inventing.

The most uncanny thing was learning, while in the midst of writing, that I was in fact a descendant of an accused witch, Mary Bliss Parsons of Massachusetts. My family is very proud of its lineage but somehow none of us had known about her, although we knew much about her husband.

Mary Sharratt: What light can historical novelists such as yourself shed on this lost world of superstition and magical beliefs?

Erika Mailman: My hope is that The Witch's Trinity shows how absurd--and dangerous-- the belief in witchcraft is. I'm not talking about modern people who have reclaimed the word "witch" and practice a benign sort of nature worship, but rather the belief in people who have made a pact with the devil to wreak havoc on others. Distressingly, there are still places in the world today where people attack and kill others for being witches, or abandon their young children for the same "crime." I've been horrified and brought to tears by recent news accounts from India, Africa and Papua New Guinea. I've blogged about many of these events at Erikamailman.blogspot.com, while my website focuses on my fiction. While I had thought my book looked at an outdated belief mode while casting light on modern-day scapegoatism, it turns out I was really writing about something current. The same sorts of accusations ring out today as they did centuries ago, hitting the themes of hunger, infertility, and the mundane occurrence of random bad luck.

Most Haunted's Pendle Witch Hunt: A Sceptic's Guide

2009-10-19T01:44:00.001-07:00

Halloween, 2004

Living TV's Most Haunted investigated several farmhouses around Newchurch in Pendle in search of the ghosts of the Pendle Witches of 1612. Their team of ghost hunters not only claimed to have had a direct encounter with the Pendle Witch "coven" in an old house on Lower Well Head Farm, but that the spirit of Old Demdike attempted to strangle TV psychic Derek Acorah, who has since been outed as a fake.

While I realise that the people most likely to read this blog take TV psychics with a healthy dose of scepticism in the first place, Halloween seems to drag out all kinds of ghoulish speculation about historical witches and cunning folk in a way that is not only historically inaccurate but disrespectful. The Pendle Witches were not ghouls. They were real living people who were held for months in a lightless dungeon in Lancaster Castle, chained to a ring in the stone floor, before being tried without any barrister and then hanged.

It doesn't help matters that reference sites such as Wikipedia mention the Most Haunted series in the same paragraph as William Ainsworth's delightfully gothic novel, The Lancashire Witches, first published in 1849, that revived the Pendle Witch story after it had lain dormant for two centuries.

Derek Acorah's bad acting notwithstanding, Most Haunted's Pendle Witch programme was full of inaccuracies.

1. The programme, investigating paranormal activity at a number of sites around Newchurch, can't even get the name of the village right. They refer to it as "Newham," just as Derek Acorah claims to channel "Elizabeth Southworth"--Mother Demdike's real name was Elizabeth Southerns. The Lancaster Witch Trials of 1612, under the reign of James I, are referred to as a "Tudor witch trial." I could go on and on. Each viewing reveals more bloopers.

2. Yvette Fielding makes a big deal about the noise of barking dogs as an indicator of paranormal activity and lurking evil. The real reason for the dog noise is quite banal. Lower Well Head Farm is situated next door to Meadow Top Boarding Kennel where one may hear barking dogs at any hour of the day or night.

3. Derek Acorah claims to psychically sense Demdike and Chattox gathering at Lower Well Head Farm in 1610 to work magic with the rest of their "coven." There are two major errors here.

English cunning folk appeared to work alone or in small family groups but there is no evidence that they worked in covens, which appeared to be a Contintental European concept first popularised in Britain by King James I in his book, Daemonologie, a witch-hunter's handbook and required reading for local magistrates. Shakespeare's play Macbeth, originally performed for James I and his court in 1605, presents the first depiction of a witches coven in English literature.

The second major error is that all recorded confessions in the Pendle Witch trials seem to indicate that Demdike and Chattox were bitter enemies in 1610 and unlikely to meet up to collaborate on any kind of magical working.

During the live "investigation," Most Haunted's viewers were invited to text their answer to the either-or-question: Where the Pendle Witches innocent victims or were they real witches with real powers? The superficiality of this question is an insult to the historical realities of cunning folk who lived in an era when everyone, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, believed that magic was real.

Cunning craft was the family trade for both Demdike (Elizabeth Southerns) and Chattox (Anne Whittle). Of course, they believed they had powers. Their very livelihood depended on it. Of course, they owned up to Roger Nowell, the prosecuting magistrate, about their familiar spirits. Without their familiars, they would have no powers and they would be revealed to be bigger fakes than Derek Acorah! How could a cunning woman bless and heal without the aid of her spirit--her otherworldly ally?

Were they innocent victims? How does one define innocence in the complex world of Jacobean witch-hunts? Anne Whittle, aka Chattox, confessed to bewitching to death her landlord's son, her motive being that he attempted to rape her daughter, Anne Redfearn, and to drive her entire family out of their cottage. In a time and place where there was a different law for the rich than for the poor and where the wealthy knew they could get away with rape, a fierce reputation as a cunning woman may have been the only power an impoverished woman could hope to wield. Was Chattox an evil witch for wanting to protect her daughter? Family love seemed to guide her every action. In the 1612 trial, she broke down and confessed her crime, then tearfully pleaded her daughter's innocence and begged the gentlemen of the court to let Anne Redfearn go free. But Anne was hanged alongside her mother.

As for Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, the trial transcripts reveal that local farmers called on her to heal their children and their cattle. She was a cunning woman of long standing before she finally died in Lancaster Prison, aged "foure-score yeares," ie eighty years old, according to Court Clerk Thomas Potts. What is amazing is not that the magistrate finally arrested her but that she practised her craft for decades and none in her community spoke against her until the very end.

It is my belief that the Elizabeth Southerns, Anne Whittle, and the other accused witches live on in Pendle as part of the undying spirit of the landscape. They are the strong cunning folk who will never be banished. But you won't find them channeled by bad TV psychics. Walk the land instead, listen to the language the land speaks, the wind and rain, the dance of the seasons. That is where the real magic begins.

For a more nuanced view on the Pendle Witches than what you will find in Most Haunted, I recommend the following books:

Primary Source:

The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster by Thomas Potts

Daemonologie by James I

Secondary Sources:

The Lancashire Witch-Craze by Jonathan Lumby

The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, edited by Robert Poole

The Trials of the Lancashire Witches by Edgar Peel and Pat Southern

Margaret Fell & George Fox

2009-09-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

Pendle Hill will forever be associated to the Pendle Witches who live on in the undying soul of the landscape and its folklore. Pendle Hill also gave birth to the Quaker movement.

In 1652, George Fox, a weaver’s son and cobbler’s apprentice turned dissenting preacher, wandered across England on a spiritual quest. When he climbed Pendle Hill, his revelation came to him—an event that would change both Fox and the world forever. He envisioned a “great multitude waiting to be gathered.”

As we travelled, we came near a very great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.

George Fox: An Autobiography, Chapter 6

Later when he walked on to Firbank Fell and met with the Westmoreland Seekers, he found his “great multitude” and the movement had its genesis.

Wandering still further, Fox came to Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria where he hoped to discuss his new religion with the lord of the manor, Thomas Fell. Mr. Fell being absent, Fox met Margaret, the mistress of the house, a woman who had been searching for spiritual direction for the past twenty years.

From the first time Margaret Fell heard Fox preach, his vision became her own. In the following three weeks, Margaret, her children, servants, estate workers, and many inhabitants of Furness became a part of burgeoning Quaker movement. When the lord of the manor finally returned, he found himself in a Quaker stronghold.

A skilled mediator, Margaret managed to reconcile her husband to the lowborn preacher who had taken such outrageous liberties. Though Thomas Fell never converted, he allowed Margaret to use Swarthmoor Hall as a meeting house for worship. Through the 1650s, Swarthmoor Hall became the powerhouse of the early Quakers. Thomas Fell died in 1658, leaving the estate to Margaret.

Regarded by many as the co-founder of the Society of Friends, Margaret devoted her life to her religion. One of the few early Quakers who was a member of the gentry, she interceded on behalf of her co-religionists who were arrested for illegal preaching or refusing to take oaths. In 1660 and 1662 she traveled to London to convince King Charles II and his parliament for freedom of conscience. In 1664, Margaret herself was arrested for failing to take an oath and for allowing Quaker meetings to be held in her home. She was sentenced for life imprisonment in Lancaster Gaol and forfeiture of her property. While in prison she wrote religious pamphlets and epistles, including her most famous work, Women’s Speaking Justified, a scripture-based argument for women’s ministry. From its very inception, the Quaker religion insisted on gender equality, women’s right to preach, the abolition of slavery and the fundamental injustice of war. One can imagine that Margaret played a leading role in the Quaker commitment to equality and social progress.

In 1668 Margaret was released from prison by order of the king. The following year she married George Fox. Returning to Lancashire, she was arrested again, and shortly after her release, Fox departed on his mission to America, only to be imprisoned upon his return to England.

Surviving both her husbands, Margaret remained a religious activist into her eighties and finally died in 1702 at the age of 88. Her last words were, “I am in Peace.”

Bernard Picard's 18th century engraving shows a woman preaching at a Quaker meeting in London.

Research trip to Bingen, Germany

2009-07-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

I just returned from Rhinehessen where I was tracing the path of medieval powerfrau Hildegard von Bingen, the subject of my current novel-in-progress.

Here are some pictures.

Hildegard was born of a noble family in the village of Bermersheim near Alzey. Nothing remains of her family home, but here is the view of the village church:

At the age of eight, according to most sources, her parents offered her, their tenth child, as a tithe to the Church. Hildegard was sent to the remote monastery of Disibodenberg where she was enclosed in an anchorage with Jutta von Sponheim, a noblewoman only seven years older than herself. Here are pictures of what they think are the ruins of the Frauenklause, or the women's anchorage:

Following Jutta's premature death, thought to be caused in part by her extreme aceticism, Hildegard was elected Magistra of her small community of nuns. In sharp contrast to Jutta, Hildegard advocated a lifestyle based on healthy moderation as opposed to constant fasting and mortification of the flesh. She began work on her magnum opus, Scivias, before taking the radical step to break free of the monks of Disibodenberg and establish her own abbey at Rupertsberg on the Rhine. Nothing remains of Rupertsberg Abbey today but it stood just off to the left side of this picture:

After initial hardships, Hildegard's abbey at Rupertsberg flourished and here she wrote on subjects as diverse as medicine, natural science, and human sexuality; healed with herbs and gemstones; corresponded with religious and secular leaders who sought her advice; and composed an entire body of sacred music. Her visions were immortalized in brilliant illuminations.

She eventually founded a daughter abbey at Eibingen, across the Rhine, just above Ruedesheim. Though the original abbey no longer remains, the new Abbey of St. Hildegard, built in 1904, is home to a community of Benedictine nuns who continue Hildegard's work. They also grow and sell excellent wine which you can taste in their giftshop. Hildegard believed that wine was very wholesome!

Here is a panoramic view of the abbey taken from the opposite bank of the Rhine:

What Hildegard achieved in her lifetime was unprecedented for a 12th century woman. Although Saint Paul forbade women to preach, Hildegard went on several preaching tours and was not afraid of locking horns with emperors or popes. She had to pay a steep price for her independence of mind. She and her nuns were the subject of an interdict, or collective excommunication, which was lifted only shortly before her death. She died, as she had lived, seeing visions of the world beyond this one.

2009 Historical Novel Society Conference

2009-06-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

Your jet-lagged Hoyden just stepped off the plane, her head a-buzz from the 2009 Historical Novel Society Conference in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was held last weekend, June 12-14.

There were some superb fan girl moments when I got to gush all over honoured guests Margaret George, Sharon Kay Penman, and Margaret Frazer, a fellow Minnesotan who writes engaging novels about sleuthing medieval nuns. Diana Gabaldon was as stunning as ever in her turquoise shawls and was the star of the Late Night Sex Reading. Unfortunately, being such a meek jet-lagged soul, I had gone to bed before her reading. For the next conference they need to have an *earlier* sex reading for those of us who need our eight hours of sleep.

I was lucky enough to meet up with my fantastic fellow Hoyden and Firebrand, Kim Murphy, who took part on the pertinent panel, Is Sex Necessary? Spicing Up Your Historical Novel (or Not) I hope the next Late Night Sex reading showcases our fabulous Kim!

Surviving as a writer in hard times seemed the dominant theme of the conference this year. Touchstone editor Trish Todd gave a great talk on the state of the market. What's selling now generally involves well known historical figures. An English setting is a plus. Paperback is a much easier sell than hardcover. Ms. Todd said that as an editor, it's important for her discover what her author's brand is and find out how she can help establish that brand. May every writer have an editor as market-savvy as Ms. Todd!

Barbara Peters, the powerhouse behind Poisoned Pen Bookstore and Poisoned Pen Press, told us that, contrary to popular opinion, the author tour is not dead. Indy bookstores can do a lot for authors and generally offer more support in terms of hand-selling and event-hosting than the big chains who demand coop money for book placement. Midlist authors need to get public face time, however they can, so get out there and meet the lovely people who work at your local indies. Sometimes it's better to set up your own tour than to rely on a publicist with no local knowledge, Peters pointed out.

Michelle Moran, Karen Essex, and CW Gortner gave a fantastic panel on what authors can do to promote their books in a dire econony. Moran stressed the importance of getting a good author website with a dedicated bloggers' and book group page. In terms of advertising, she pointed out that online ads get you more bang for your buck--blog ads are the way to go but just be sure to be creative in finding out what blogs your audience reads. Moran reported much success advertising her novels of Ancient Egypt on the LOL Cat website, I Can Has Cheezburger, which leads me to wonder whether there is a Crazy Horse Lady-centric site that would be great for advertising my novels!

Karen Essex talked about the importance of writing for the market--ie producing an excellent book that people want to read. Choose well known characters that intrigue people or, if you write about invented characters, find a wonderfully arresting setting.

C.W. Gortner discussed the importance of perserverance and investing in your career. It can't hurt and might help a lot to spend up to half your advance on publicity and marketing. If you blog, as he does wonderfully on his site Historical Boys, have something to say. It shouldn't be all about self-promotion. He felt that virtual blog tours are more successful in terms of sales and publicity than the traditional author tour.

Getting back on topic, namely Hoydens and Firebrands of the 17th Century, the freebies in our conference bag included galleys of Katherine Howe's magnificent debut novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a meticulously researched book which dares to ask the question: what if historical witches were *really* witches rather than misunderstood eccentrics? Although I haven't yet finished reading the book, so far I'm impressed with her fictional depiction of historical magic and cunning folk and am intrigued that we've drawn on many of the same sources, such as Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic. It's very affirming to see that nonsensationalist fiction about historical witches and cunning folk is getting the critical and commercial success it deserves. Hopefully this will help dispell any number of inaccurate stereotypes.

Meanwhile my own forthcoming novel about historical cunning folk has undergone a name change. The original title was A Light Far-Shining: A Novel of the Pendle Witches, but my publisher felt that was a bit too wordy and hard to remember. My excellent editor helped me brainstorm a new, catchier title: Daughters of the Witching Hill. I like that very, very much. My witchy novel will be out in April or May of 2010. Watch this space!

The Witching Hill, aka Pendle, in May 2009. This is actually the view from my backyard!

Welcome

2009-05-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog, which is designed as any easy way to let visitors to my website know about my latest news and upcoming events.

I'm eagerly looking forward to the Historical Novel Society 2009 Conference in Schaumberg, Illinois, June 12-14. I'll be joining Peg Herring's panel, Talking the Talk: Historical Fiction Dialogue.

I'll also be participating in the costume parade, which should be fun. Look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

Also please check out Hoydens and Firebrands, a lively new blog featuring me and five of my friends who are stellar writers of historical fiction set in the 17th century.

Spirited women in that period were often called Roaring Girls. Hence the name of this blog.

So let your hair down and saddle your horse for a rip-roaring ride.