Selina O’Grady
A Familiar World
Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
By Malcolm Gaskill
John Murray 384pp £20 order from our bookshop
Pity the poor witches of old: they must turn in their graves at the interest they have attracted in the twentieth century and beyond. Radical feminists have espoused them as female victims of a murderous patriarchy: nine million women burnt to death, no matter that the figure was invented by a male antiquarian (50,000 is more likely), that men as well as women died, or that most witches were hanged, not burned. Modern pagans claim witches as their forebears and recently demanded an apology from the Pope (not forthcoming). Greens see them as communing with healing nature; socialist historians as pawns in the game of the ruling elite; and they have been forced into the service of every passing fad of modern historiography.
Fortunately, there is scarcely a mention of ‘gender’, little psychoanalysis and no literary theory in historian Malcolm Gaskill’s account of England’s worst witch-hunt. Between 1645 and 1647, at the height of the Civil War, nearly 300 people in East Anglia were tried for witchcraft, and over 100 were hanged. Neighbour
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers