British Folk Magic & Familiar Spirits

In popular imagination, the figure of a witch is accompanied by her familiar, a black cat. Is there any historical authenticity behind this cliché?

Our ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries believed that magic was real. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in witchcraft and the spirit world—rich and educated people believed in spellcraft just as strongly. Cunning folk were men and women who used charms and herbal cures to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was illegal—sorcery was a hanging offence—but few were arrested. The need for the services they provided was too 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 herbal charms was far less likely to kill you.

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 could turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. Ultimately the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder.

While witch-hunters were obsessed with extracting “evidence” of a pact between the accused witch and the devil, there’s little if any substantive proof of diabolical worship in Britain in this period. It seemed the black mass was a Continental European concept first popularised in Britain by King James I’ polemic, Daemonologie, a witch-hunter’s handbook and required reading for his magistrates.

In traditional British folk magic, it was not the devil, but the familiar spirit who took centre stage. The familiar was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form. Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, was a cunning woman of long standing repute, arrested on witchcraft charges in the 1612 Pendle witch hunt in Lancashire, England. When interrogated by her magistrate, she made no attempt to conceal her craft. In fact she described in rich detail how her familiar spirit, Tibb, first appeared to her when she was walking past a quarry at twilight. Assuming the guise of a beautiful, golden-haired young man, his coat half black, half brown, he promised to teach her all she needed to know about the ways of magic. When not in human form, he could appear to her as a brown dog or a hare. Her partnership with Tibb would span decades.

Mother Demdike was so forthcoming about her familiar because without one, she, as a cunning woman, would be a fraud. In traditional English folk magic, it seemed that no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their familiar spirit—they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Black cats were not the most popular guise for a familiar to take. In fact, familiars were more likely to appear as dogs. In the Salem witch trials of 1692, two canines were put to death as suspected witch familiars.

But the familiar was just as likely to assume human form, generally the opposite gender of their human partner—cunning men usually had female spirits while cunning women usually had male spirits.

Was there a connection between the familiar spirits and the Fairy Faith, the lingering belief in fey folk and elves? Popular belief in fairies in the Early Modern period 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. In 1576, Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop, executed for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit had been sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame. For more background on this subject, I highly recommend Emma Wilby’s scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, and Keith Thomas’s social history, Religion and the Decline of Magic.

New Year, New Book

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.

Writing Women Back into History

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.”

Interview with Katherine Howe!

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)

Daughters of the Witching Hill: What the critics are saying

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

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

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

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.

Pendle Witch photo album

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.