The Witches of St Osyth

Description

An emotive, haunting story of a community torn apart, the Essex witch accusations and trial of 1581-2 are, taken together, one of the pivotal instances of that malign and destructive wave of misogynistic persecution which periodically broke over early modern England. Yet, for all their importance in the overall study of witchcraft, the so-called witches of St Osyth have largely been overlooked by scholars. Marion Gibson now sets right that neglect. Using fresh archival sources - and investigating not just the village itself, but also its neighbouring Elizabethan hamlets and habitations - the author offers revelatory new insights into the sixteen women and one man accused of sorcery while asking wider, provocative questions about the way history is recollected and interpreted. Combining landscape detective work, a reconstruction of lost spaces and authoritative readings of crucial documents, Gibson skilfully unlocks the poignant personal histories of those denied the chance to speak for themselves.

Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Fascinated by witches' stories for nearly thirty years, she is the author of Reading Witchcraft (1999), Early Modern Witches (2000), Witchcraft and Society (2003), Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (2007), Imagining the Pagan Past (2013), Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft (2017) and Witchcraft: The Basics (2018). In addition she serves as General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Magic.

'This terrific book is that of a historian at the top of her game, bringing all her knowledge, research skills, and writing ability to the task. In so doing, Marion Gibson has made an important addition to our knowledge of Elizabethan witchcraft. But the text is also written for a more general audience and is engagingly written with that audience in mind too. Thus, the book has all the virtues of a 'crossover' study that will appeal both to the academic specialist and the more general reader. It demonstrates that good history writing can be erudite as well as entertaining.' Philip Almond, University of Queensland 'This terrific book is that of a historian at the top of her game, bringing all her knowledge, research skills, and writing ability to the task. It demonstrates that good history can be erudite as well as entertaining.' Philip Almond, University of Queensland 'Marion Gibson is a very well-established and respected scholar with a particular reputation for expertise in the kind of sources she uses so effectively in this book. She is able to combine here first-rate academic research with a popular and accessible literary style. The book takes a very famous English witchcraft case and supplies genuinely new material by which that case may be understood, both by a close rereading of the celebrated text and by a contextualisation of it in a range of hitherto completely untapped local records.' Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol 'Marion Gibson is able to combine here first-rate academic research with a popular and accessible literary style.' Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol 'An excellent monograph and contribution to the field of witchcraft studies.' Diane Purkiss, University of Oxford