England’s Witchcraft trials

Mad, hag and dangerous to know Author Willow Winsham Publisher Pen & Sword Price £12.99 Released Out now

To confront the obvious: Willow Winsham is one of our own writers and we’re very much in love with her work. As co-founder of #Folklorethursday, and author of Accused: British Witches Throughout History and our recent cover story on Matthew Hopkins, the notorious Witchfinder General, England’s Witchcraft Trials comes with undeniable chops.

With no interest in reinforcing the robust mythology of ducking stools and witch burnings, Winsham subverts those expectations case-by-case, to expose the subtle differences between those rare English outbreaks of witch panic.

A fantastic example is the Witches of Warboys which has the familiar escalating mania of Salem and the hormonally-powered fantasy of many modern hauntings or possessions, but then the accused finds herself held captive by the accusers when it is believed that only her proximity can ease the suffering of the young girls she has “bewitched”.

It’s fascinatingly personal and the small-scale dynamics of the situation offer a level of study that community-level panics do not, and Winsham ends each case with astute observations and the teasing out of various theories that speaks of deep research and easy intimacy with the topic.

The cow’s heart on the hearth, however, is that England’s Witchcraft Trials is rather abrupt. It plunges you straight into its chapter-by-chapter cases, and then ends equally brusquely with no substantial conclusion nor sense of a through-line.

When a book is as interesting, informative and insightful as this, it’s natural to be left wanting more, but frustrating to know more is only slightly out of reach.

“Winsham subverts those expectations case-by-case”