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
In this month's crime round-up, @NJCooper_crime reviews thrillers by @JohnBrownlow, @SGMacleanauthor, @HelenMTakhar, @valmcdermid, @emstylesauthor, @AvaGlassBooks, @RuthWareWriter and @VaseemKhanUK.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/august-2022-crime-round-up
'Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria ... was as full of trouble and strife as the most harrowing of hard-luck case histories.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony