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Short Story Press Presents The Witches Of Lancaster by Danielle Oatfield Three suburban friends had normal and routine lives. They each had their challenges, but overall things were normal. The one thing they had to look forward to each week was their wine night. One night every week they would get together, drink wine, and gossip about the other women in the neighborhood. This all changed when one of the women decided to shake things up and brought a mysterious book of spells and magic to their wine night. She had a terrible, wonderful confession. She had been using magic to improve her life and it was working. Now she wants to share this gift with her two best friends. It seemed harmless e...
'An important and timely book.' - Philippa Gregory Joan of Navarre was the richest woman in the land, at a time when war-torn England was penniless. Eleanor Cobham was the wife of a weak king's uncle – and her husband was about to fall from grace. Jacquetta Woodville was a personal enemy of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was about to take his revenge. Elizabeth Woodville was the widowed mother of a child king, fighting Richard III for her children's lives. In Royal Witches, Gemma Hollman explores the lives of these four unique women, looking at how rumours of witchcraft brought them to their knees in a time when superstition and suspicion was rife.
‘It seems probable that there are no more moss witches; the times are cast against them. But you can never be certain. In that sense they are like their mosses; they vanish from sites they are known to have flourished in, they are even declared extinct – and then they are there again, there or somewhere else, small, delicate but triumphant, alive. Moss Witches, like mosses, do not compete; they retreat….’ Each story in Sara Maitland’s new collection enacts a daring kind of alchemy, fusing together raw elements of scientific theory with ancient myth, folkloric archetype and contemporary storytelling. As the laboratory smoke settles, we are treated to a new strain of narrative: a hyb...
The years between 1600 and 1700 were a period of war, famine, plague and religious upheaval in Scotland.A time when ordinary women, and men, of the Scottish Borders who fell under the suspicion of the Kirk would face interrogation and torture.A time when fear of Auld Nick turned the world upside down and the cry of witch would almost always lead to the rope and the flame.Mary Craig explores this tremulous period of Scottish history and examines the causes and effects of the 17th century witchcraft trials and executions in the Scottish Borders.
Fairytales with a twist from the Man Booker and Orange prize-shortlisted author of Room. In Kissing the Witch, Emma Donoghue unwinds thirteen fairy tales and writes them anew: Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother, Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror, and Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. In these stories, Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances – sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.
In 1622, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Jennings fell strangely ill. After doctors’ treatments proved useless, her family began to suspect the child had been bewitched, a suspicion that was confirmed when Elizabeth accused their neighbor Margaret Russell of witchcraft. In the events that followed, witchcraft hysteria intertwines with family rivalries, property disputes, and a web of supernatural beliefs. Starting from a manuscript account of the bewitchment, Kirsten Uszkalo sets the story of Elizabeth Jennings against both the specific circumstances of the powerful Jennings family and the broader history of witchcraft in early modern England. Fitting together the intricate pieces of this complex puzzle, Uszkalo reveals a story that encompasses the iron grip of superstition, the struggle among professionalizing medical specialties, and London’s lawless and unstoppable sprawl. In the picture that emerges, we see the young Elizabeth, pinned like a live butterfly at the dark center of a web of greed and corruption, sickness and lunacy.
How did our ancestors use the concept of demons to explain sleep paralysis? Is that carving in the porch of your local church really what you think it is? And what's that tapping noise on the roof of your car..? The fields of folklore have never been more popular – a recent resurgence of interest in traditional beliefs and customs, coupled with morbid curiosities in folk horror, historic witchcraft cases and our superstitious past, have led to an intersection of ideas that is driving people to seek out more information. Tracey Norman (author of the acclaimed play WITCH) and Mark Norman (creator of The Folklore Podcast) lead you on an exploration of those more salubrious facets of our past, highlighting those aspects of our cultural beliefs and social history that are less 'wicker basket' and more 'Wicker Man'.
Leila is about to spend a weekend with her Aunt Fred, whom everyone says is a witch. When the adults leave, Aunt Fred puts on a wild outfit and scoops Leila up onto her motorcycle. After a spectacular day, Leila forgets that Aunt Fred is supposed to be a witch. But a bedtime drink makes her wonder... is Aunt Fred trying to hex her?
We are witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations. In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s most ...
By spring 1645, two years of civil war had exacted a dreadful toll upon England. People lived in terror as disease and poverty spread, and the nation grew ever more politically divided. In a remote corner of Essex, two obscure gentlemen, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, exploited the anxiety and lawlessness of the time and initiated a brutal campaign to drive out the presumed evil in their midst. Touring Suffolk and East Anglia on horseback, they detected demons and idolators everywhere. Through torture, they extracted from terrified prisoners confessions of consorting with Satan and demonic spirits. Acclaimed historian Malcolm Gaskill retells the chilling story of the most savage witch-hun...