00:10:30.340And I think people have always believed in that sort of magic.
00:10:33.200You know, there's quite a lot of evidence from prehistory that people are blending ideas of what we might now think of as religion and what we might now think of as magic.
00:10:42.980So this kind of basic human thing is, I think, is one of the ways we think about the world.
00:10:48.240But come the religious upheavals in the Christian church in Western Europe and North America in the 16th and 17th century, that all gets very difficult for people to think about.
00:10:58.800so they start accusing each other you know christians start accusing each other of heresy
00:11:04.220protestant catholic other groups splitting off from those two two big separating churches and
00:11:10.780then they start looking for people who they think are outside of that and the whole thing just gets
00:11:15.500more and more problematic and magic gets drawn into this religious debate because people start
00:11:21.600thinking well i'm not really sure if this person is on is on god's side or the devil's side and one
00:11:27.260of the ways that I might work out that they're on the devil's side is looking to see if they
00:11:31.660practice any kind of magic so do they maybe do magical healing do they do they say prayers in
00:11:37.820places that I'd really prefer them not to say prayers in are they the sort of person who I
00:11:42.180don't think should be saying prayers or preaching or standing up and speaking about religious matters1.00
00:11:48.000you know are they are they a woman quite often but are they also maybe a poorer man or somebody
00:11:54.260who's unqualified in the terms of the church at the time. So I wanted to look at that way that
00:12:00.000over time magic had become associated with the devil and demonized. And then in modern times,
00:12:05.980even though, you know, now we often think of ourselves being more enlightened and more
00:12:09.760accepting and tolerant and all of these kind of things, very often you will find that people who
00:12:15.120are in all those groups that I talked about earlier, find themselves being accused of some
00:12:19.800sort of crime which has a magical aspect to it so later on in the book I talk about a woman who's
00:12:25.680a spiritualist medium and how she's accused and dragged off to court and I talk about faith healers
00:12:32.340in Pennsylvania in the 1920s and then I bring it right up to date and I talk about Stormy Daniels
00:12:38.700who has been you know is a pagan and has been accused of witchcraft in quite straightforward
00:12:43.560terms as part of the general debate around her role in modern American politics. So I've tried
00:12:51.260to find examples throughout history of where magic has been regarded as a bad thing rather
00:12:56.900than a good thing, which I think is how it might have been regarded in the very earliest of human
00:13:02.780societies. And what do you think about
00:13:07.220trust these days, right? I want to read a little piece because I want to hear you talk more about
00:13:14.740the relationship between witch hunting and colonialism. You identify these different
00:13:19.240moments where the Sami indigenous woman, and you give her a different name, Tituba Tatave,
00:13:25.240than I had seen before, but really identifying these moments where, and you know, we've seen it
00:13:30.360in Colombia and in the Philippines, where inquisition or witch hunt is really used as part
00:13:35.900of a colonizing endeavor. Can you talk about, I love this quote. I'm going to read your writing
00:13:41.540at you. That's okay. So you wrote, scholars have recently suggested that the earlier transatlantic
00:13:46.340trade in enslaved people was seen by its victims as a type of witchcraft, just as they had previously
00:13:51.500imagined witches metaphorically consuming happiness, fertility, and wealth. So some
00:13:55.620enslaved people described themselves as victims of witches who they thought would literally eat
00:14:00.300them in Barbados or Boston. Together with redefinition by incoming Christians, this new0.86
00:14:06.120conception of witchcraft as slavery may have destabilized traditional beliefs. A study published
00:14:12.000in 2020 claims in Africa and North and South America, representatives of ethnic groups that
00:14:16.260are more severely raided during the Atlantic slave trade era are more likely to believe in witchcraft.
00:14:21.400This hypothesis doesn't explain everything about contemporary African witchcraft trials,
00:14:25.000but it points to links between colonial violence and a legacy of social mistrust.
00:14:30.300trust broken down. I have like seven more paragraphs outlined and realizing it's a really
00:14:34.860long thing to read. But would you think out loud about that? I think that was one of the things
00:14:38.840that I found most interesting because somebody who writes about early stuff, some of the more
00:14:44.140recent witchcraft accusations. So for example, the ones that I write about across South Africa
00:14:48.720were the ones I knew least about. So I went chasing other scholars had to say about why they
00:14:54.680thought witchcraft belief was so prevalent there and why people were so violently persecuted I
00:15:01.220mean hundreds of people are being killed as witches across southern Africa but also in other parts of
00:15:06.360the world parts of India Nepal parts of Indonesia and I wanted to think about that we spend a lot
00:15:13.160of time telling ourselves how rational we are today and how we would never do that and all those
00:15:18.220kind of things but it turns out they're not really true so I thought it was important to look at that
00:15:22.720and to look back at the long history of people exploiting other people
00:15:27.520and see what kind of place the idea of witchcraft had in that.
00:15:32.260And what that report by those scholars that I cited in the chapter argued
00:15:36.360was that it's the exploitation which turns into enslavement
00:15:41.800and turns into the transatlantic trade in enslaved people
00:15:44.960is inherently connected to ideas of magic
00:15:47.900because the people who were enslaved already lived in a magical world,
00:15:52.280you know as lots of people did in that period and lots of our own ancestors in Europe and North
00:15:57.360America did too they perceived what was being done to them as some kind of magical exploitation
00:16:03.280because they couldn't think of another way to to explain it you know their whole world was being
00:16:08.760dismantled their culture was being destroyed they themselves had been captured and dragged away to
00:16:14.180a place which was utterly strange to them and they had enormous trouble making sense of it some of
00:16:20.020took with them their magical practices as a way of trying to make sense of that world. There's
00:16:25.540quite a lot of interesting archaeological evidence about what kind of things they did.
00:16:29.920So I wanted to think about the ways that they thought of the world as magical,
00:16:34.140and they thought of the colonists as witches, which is a really interesting juxtaposition,
00:16:38.760isn't it? But at the same time, those who were colonising their world often were involved in
00:16:44.160missionary activities too, so were trying to Christianise them. The way that those people
00:16:48.800thought about the indigenous folks that they were exploiting as witches and use the idea of
00:16:54.340witchcraft accusation against them. It's really complicated because the people, the indigenous
00:17:00.100people who are living there are very often people who believe in witchcraft and accuse others of
00:17:04.840witchcraft. Yet the colonizers still manage to find a way to make the witch trial count against
00:17:11.400them. Whether it's saying, oh, you know, you superstitious people, you're accusing each other
00:17:15.460witchcraft. This is bad. Therefore, we must civilize you and take your country from you and
00:17:19.640colonize it. Or they're saying, oh, well, actually, you know, you are practicing witchcraft. This is
00:17:24.920very bad. We must take your country away from you and colonize it. So witchcraft gets very much1.00
00:17:30.660mixed up in discourses of colonization, it seems to me. And I thought it was really important to
00:17:36.140talk about that because, again, it's something that we see a lot in the world today. And it
00:17:40.840helps to explain why witchcraft accusations are so common in parts of africa india indonesia and
00:17:47.180so on i want to know what you think about so as someone who i have a witch podcast i'm really
00:17:53.360interested in the word and in the identity you know gives me power and i'm interested in the
00:17:59.260history and the sort of intersection between politics and art and grounding in a spirituality
00:18:03.300after not really having any and just in the community it gives me but i fear that you know
00:18:09.340the other pieces of that, that like entertaining, exploring ideas around the unknown makes us more
00:18:15.380vulnerable to conspiracy theories or that building a community, embracing ideas of witchcraft
00:18:20.760somehow makes it more dangerous for people who are being accused of witchcraft because we're
00:18:25.220somehow giving validation to the idea that witches are real. And, you know, you've done all this
00:18:30.320research right at the intersection of this question, the way that this word gets used against
00:18:34.640people in this sort of flip-floppy, violent way. What do you think about that these days?
00:18:40.680Yeah, that's really interesting. And it's a really insightful thing to say that, you know, by
00:18:45.840ourselves believing in magic and witchcraft, are we in some way saying, oh, well, you know,
00:18:51.200the witch trials of the past are fine. And the witch trials of people in contemporary Africa0.60
00:18:55.400is fine because, yes, they actually are witches. So there we go. It's really difficult to think0.97
00:19:01.160about, isn't it? And when you look back at the history of people arguing against witch trials,
00:19:06.860some of the first people to do so were 18th century folks who looked at the history of
00:19:13.480the past and said, well, that's just superstition, isn't it? You know, we're radical lawyers of the
00:19:17.92018th century. We're French revolutionaries. We're going to stop believing in religion altogether,
00:19:23.020not just witchcraft, but everything. The idea of a supernatural world, the idea of
00:19:27.880supernatural beings, you know, just throw out the angels and the fairies and the spirits of the0.90
00:19:33.540past and God and the devil and demons and all of it. Just get rid of all of it, because that's the1.00
00:19:38.860only way the world is going to be safe for people and they won't be accused of witchcraft anymore.
00:19:44.120And I think that's a really powerful thing to say. You know, it kind of appeals to me, that level of,
00:19:49.220right, blank slate, let's just start here and let's only believe in things that we can verify
00:19:53.880with our own eyes etc or let's reframe the world in ways that we think well it will exclude certain
00:20:00.860things but we don't mind losing those things if it means we also lose witch trials I think that's
00:20:06.160a really powerful thing for people to have thought but I think that what it does is is often it does
00:20:12.940strip the world of that sense of of well magic I suppose you know the beyond the fantastical
00:20:21.260and you see at the same time as people are trying to desacralize the world in that way in the 18th
00:20:27.760century get the rise of stuff like gothic literature so you get all the ghosts and the
00:20:32.360angels and the demons and the witches all kind of creeping back in through the back door and you
00:20:36.980know they bring with them stuff like vampires and all the kind of figures that we actually really
00:20:43.340like to think about i think there is something intrinsic in the human mind that wants all of
00:20:48.140that stuff and you know who am i who am i or anyone to deny it to people if that's the way
00:20:54.620you see the world then great that's fine it seems to me the key thing is you know this is part of
00:21:00.640modern wiccans creed isn't it and and which is creed you know depending how people identify
00:21:06.660themselves it's about not harming people so it in a sense it doesn't matter to me as a historian or
00:21:13.460as a person what people believe in so long as they do it in a way which is tolerant and careful
00:21:19.980and avoids causing harm I think there's a lot to be said for re-enchanting the world because quite
00:21:26.620often it can bring back the idea of a connection between people that idea of community that you've
00:21:33.040talked about getting together to create a world together when it can bring back a connection with
00:21:39.000the natural world, which can also seem haunted and empowered and spiritual in its own way.
00:21:46.080And I think those are really good things.
00:21:47.780Yeah, I mean, throughout my career, I've kind of struggled with the same sort of ideas,
00:21:52.460which means very different things to different people.
00:21:55.900It can mean a hapless victim of lunatic aggressors, or it can mean empowered spiritual person, priestess or goddess.
00:22:27.420And do you always feel like, well, I guess there's an assumption
00:22:31.360in my question, do you feel like first that there is this sort
00:22:34.660of rise in interest in witchcraft and studying witchcraft
00:22:37.460I think there is. And if you do, do you think that that is related? Like, I feel like sometimes the question of witches and witch hunting and whether there's magic, the unknown in science, that it's tangled right up in the complexity of this moment.
00:22:51.760to think about witches isn't really this fringe story anymore because we're right in this in the
00:22:57.600heart of this moment of like is is an enchanted world possible like is is is a is a liberated
00:23:04.080world possible or are we just fucking doomed you know what I mean it feels like really urgent to
00:23:10.740engage with it somehow yeah I think that's right I think your assumption is absolutely right people
00:23:15.740are more interested in witches now witches are having a moment um and I think they have been
00:23:21.220since at least the 1990s and probably before actually you know you could also look back to
00:23:26.220the particularly the feminist movements of the 70s and 80s when people started being interested
00:23:31.940in reclaiming the idea of witchcraft in modern times although the book also looks back to
00:23:36.260Victorian people who were interested in that too so I do think it's been going off quite a long time
00:23:41.200but I think since the 1990s it's really been hotting up if you like and people have become
00:23:46.680more interested in what the which means and that is partly because of that idea of trying to
00:23:52.480re-sacralize the world so that ultimately you don't blow it up or destroy it in other ways
00:23:57.720I think you're right that does feel pretty urgent doesn't it but also people have become interested
00:24:04.040in it maybe in just the past five or six years really as we've seen increasing misogyny in the
00:24:09.040world and and we've started to think well I've started to think that some of these problems
00:24:13.400just haven't gone away we haven't changed things as much as we maybe thought we had or thought that
00:24:18.020we should have done and words like witch do retain a relevance therefore it must at one time surely
00:24:24.260have seemed that witch was a word you would only use about the past but actually now here people
00:24:29.140are being accused of witchcraft in the present and people are still finding the idea of the witch
00:24:32.920powerful so yeah I think there's a really interesting and quite lengthy cultural moment
00:24:38.560happening around the witch I don't know how it's going to turn out no and as you say you talked
00:24:43.500about conspiracy theory earlier it's the intersections between ideas of magic and
00:24:48.560witchcraft and ideas of conspiracy theory really interesting aren't they because conspiracy theory
00:24:53.700often leads us at least in my view into places where we really don't want to go
00:24:58.780where you know we end up in this kind of post-truth world and anything goes and people can
00:25:04.920make up any kind of awful libel against other people and find ways to force it upon them and
00:25:12.720that you know that's a bad thing so is it possible to be too magical is it possible to re-enchant the
00:25:18.800world too much so that we've moved away from the 18th century lawyers and their insistence on
00:25:24.420provability and we've moved towards it doesn't matter if you can prove it or not it could be
00:25:28.780true anyway i don't know i don't know i feel i feel enmeshed in it the same as you do but i do
00:25:35.800think the witch is a really powerful way of talking about that because the witch is right
00:25:40.080at the center of that long history of humans trying to work out how the world works what
00:25:45.260are places within it how we're supposed to relate to each other is that is there a world beyond is
00:25:51.140there a supernatural world you know the witch helps us think about all of that and i think
00:25:55.380that's really quite important to have that discussion totally and you make me think i mean
00:26:00.500the invention of the witch by historians sort of wanders this line between like really great history
00:26:07.820and you know as you i think really kind of lovingly point out like an invention that used
00:26:14.560history in a way that was quite creative that sort of helped us get to a sexually liberated
00:26:20.180gender, you know, defiance of norms, way of thinking about witchcraft, but that that history
00:26:26.120was kind of fuzzy, like the Michelets or Doreen Valiente or Margaret Murray. Can you talk about
00:26:33.100that way of doing history that's sort of problematic, but sort of gifted us some stuff?
00:26:37.760Yeah, I totally can. That's something I've developed increased tolerance for. You know,
00:26:41.960when I first started out doing history, I was just like, no, these people are wrong.
00:26:45.900we're not discussing that that's just wrong it didn't happen like that history wasn't like that
00:26:51.000you know the 16th century women were most likely not nature loving goddess worshiping pagans but
00:26:57.580the idea that they might have been is super powerful isn't it and I gradually came to have
00:27:03.580much more tolerance for that idea because I could see that the historians like people like
00:27:08.320Jean Michelet who were putting it forward really had their hearts in the right place and I thought
00:27:13.600that went rather a long way towards my feeling warmer to them so the first time I read Michelet's
00:27:19.840book you know I was going through I think I may even have written in the margins I don't know I
00:27:25.000had a cheap 70s paperback that I've still got I may even have written no every now and again
00:27:31.160in the margin no you know I'm really sorry but no they were not empowered pagan priestesses I wish
00:27:37.140they had have been but they weren't they were just medieval women who were struggling with a church
00:27:42.120that wanted to silence them but then you know once you start thinking well yeah they were
00:27:46.360struggling with a church that wanted to silence them what if somebody in the 19th century
00:27:50.660wanted to reinvent them as pagan priestesses who am I to stop him so yeah I think the ways of
00:27:58.540thinking about the history of witchcraft need to be more open actually and I think we've kind of0.58
00:28:03.860there's a phrase throwing the baby out with the bathwater I don't know if you have that
00:28:07.820But we have that, that, you know, you've thrown away the precious thing in an attempt to rid
00:28:12.280yourself of the, you know, less good thing. And I kind of feel that historians have sometimes got a
00:28:19.040bit too interested in stuff like, you know, the economics of history or stuff about, you know,
00:28:25.660social relationships and class and so on. And they perhaps noticed a little bit less,
00:28:30.960look, these are women. Look, they might have unusual religious views. We sometimes don't1.00
00:28:35.740know, but sometimes it's quite clear that we did have some heretical views. Maybe they weren't
00:28:40.880pagans, not in the modern sense, but what about all that folklore that they knew? What about the
00:28:46.360stories that they told each other? It's worth listening to see if you can find those things,
00:29:36.360And I do love thinking about, I'll interrupt myself to say we have members of our coven here who are witches, practitioners, academics, artists from all different kinds of perspectives and worldviews.
00:29:52.320I will invite folks, if you do want to ask a question or just engage in this conversation, I'm going to make sure we have time for that.
00:30:01.960But I wanted to ask, you know, when we're thinking about these stories, you know, like women of the 16th century, what did they really believe?
00:30:15.560talking about colonization from the perspective even of Roman colonization, you know, burning
00:30:21.700sacred groves. What were these like longer memories that people maybe in the country were
00:30:27.860holding on to? As a researcher, what do you suggest? What are some practices of, often I ask
00:30:36.020people for like a ritual or something they're doing right now, but I'm going to ask you for
00:30:39.280a research practice instead. What's a research practice you suggest for us when we go looking
00:30:44.500for these stories especially stories that exceed the archives women's stories the stories of
00:30:50.120colonized enslaved people there's a lot of places where we don't make it into the archives how can
00:30:57.220we connect to those stories yeah that's a great question and you know it pushes me in a direction
00:31:03.540that I've been going for some time which is seeing the practice of researching history as being an
00:31:10.980emotional one actually you know having emotional engagement it does have elements of ritual
00:31:16.140that the pleasing aspects of historical research the going through the catalogs the
00:31:21.560the going to special places to do the research the immense privilege of being able to touch
00:31:26.760the original record and find names in them that you recognize you know that's it's it's kind of
00:31:33.760a church and therefore it's kind of a ritual so I yeah I hear you when you say hang on this is kind
00:31:42.120of like the moment when you ask somebody about ritual the things that I do I suppose would be
00:31:47.940try and go to the places where the people lived if you possibly can there's any way you can get
00:31:52.640to any of them and walk around in them and and try to see what they see you try to feel what they
00:31:58.540felt you know is it cold there is it hot there what if you shut your eyes what can you hear
00:32:02.980what do you smell there what do you know from the records that they might have smelled there
00:32:07.420in the past or seen there in the past you know if you shut your eyes can you imagine what that
00:32:11.620might have looked like what does the landscape look like how do you feel there is it a flat
00:32:16.460landscape where you feel exposed is it a hilly landscape you know what's going on in it is the
00:32:21.560sea there is it is it a big open plain what is it so I found those kind of things really useful
00:32:27.660And sort of walking around as far as you possibly can in the footsteps of the accused people or their accusers, I think, is really interesting.
00:32:37.700It's certainly something I've done in a previous book called The Witches of St. Joseph that I wrote.
00:32:42.060I went on this kind of 11-mile trudge.
00:32:45.560I didn't dignify it by saying it was a hike or, you know, a trail.
00:32:50.440It was a trudge around muddy lanes in Essex County in England.
00:32:57.660And I tired myself and I allowed myself to feel kind of vulnerable.
00:33:04.080You know, I was staying in a kind of glamping place and it was cold.
00:33:08.000It was January just before the pandemic, which, of course, we didn't know was coming.
00:33:12.340And so I tried to feel the way they might have felt, these women who were accused of
00:33:17.980And they'd gone around from house to house, farm to farm, begging for charity, you know,
00:33:22.200often been turned away, often had crosswords for the householders and something terrible
00:33:27.140happened to the householder and they thought aha you know it's that person who came to the door she
00:33:31.560cursed me that's what it is but I thought it was important to do it was important to slip in the
00:33:36.080mud and it was important to have sore feet and it was important to be hungrier than I really wanted
00:33:39.920to be and tired than I really wanted to be and just think about what those people might have felt
00:33:45.260like so I do all of those things and also I do feel that records lead you where they want you
00:33:51.400to go and that's something that I think a lot of historians feel most of them don't talk about
00:33:56.440because it sounds kind of magical doesn't it but they do you know you find things because it almost
00:34:02.760feels like they are waiting there for you they are waiting to be found some stories want to be told
00:34:07.780some stories maybe don't want to be told and those are the harder ones to get out of the archive
00:34:13.240but I do feel that and I just feel I just feel I feel so happy when I find the story of one of
00:34:20.700these people and I trace them and I care about them I think caring about history is really
00:34:25.540important and I increasingly less trouble about saying it you know when you're in a kind of early
00:34:30.980career academic you don't say all that stuff necessarily because you want people to think
00:34:35.700of you as a kind of 18th century lawyer figure who is rational and focused and orderly and has
00:34:40.900a strategy and all of those things but the older I get the more I think no you know what that isn't
00:34:45.800how I do things I kind of putter towards things you know feeling about them so it's guided by
00:34:52.540emotion it's guided by something that might be instinct or might be experience who is to say
00:34:57.600it feels kind of magical so it does it there is there is an element of ritual I think in
00:35:02.900historical research and if people want to follow that and go after a figure that they feel some
00:35:08.320empathy with in history and try to research their story by going to the place that they lived or
00:35:14.160doing the things that they did I think that's all brilliant I do think people outside of
00:35:19.360academic institutions could do really good history in that way I feel emotional hearing you say that
00:35:24.660many of the stories in your book made me very emotional because I I'm especially the first one
00:35:29.980like Helena you know because it's such a it's such a wrench you know I'm so proud of her and of her
00:35:36.980community but to know that that is the kernel story behind her her prosecutor behind so much
00:35:44.900of what comes next it's really really bittersweet are are there moments in the book that were really
00:35:52.400emotional to discover yes absolutely yeah I think Helena's story so the first trial you know set in
00:36:00.4201485 in in Austria where this this woman Helena is accused of witchcraft but she fights back I think
00:36:09.140that was a real turning point in writing the book and I wanted to start the book there because it's
00:36:12.940a surprise isn't it we often think of witches as hapless people who were victimized you know were
00:36:18.780forced into confession and that's absolutely true of many of them they were not able to do anything
00:36:24.220to save themselves but this woman did and I really did find that quite inspiring yeah she she you
00:36:30.920know she shouted at her persecutor she stood up in court she went and got herself a lawyer she was
00:36:35.700lucky in various ways you know she had access to the the level of education the level of religious
00:36:41.820education the the money that allowed her to do that she had some support from her community
00:36:46.880but she did it she's great so I love that moment and you know and there are sadder ones too the
00:36:53.160one that's really engaging me at the moment is chapter five which is about Bess Clark a disabled
00:36:59.760single mother from Essex in the 1640s who gets caught up in the the big witch hunt in eastern
00:37:06.040England led by this chap the witch finder general Matthew Hopkins and I'm still working on that
00:37:11.440actually, I'm still looking at other stories from that group of people. Because in the end,0.97
00:37:16.660there are a couple of hundred people who are accused across those eastern counties.
00:37:20.720And most of their stories haven't been told. People haven't looked in the archives for those
00:37:24.720women because they don't tend to look in the archives for the stories of poor women because
00:37:30.240they think they're not going to find anything. You know, so they don't look. But I would like1.00
00:37:36.260to find more of those stories because I feel so sorry for people like Bess who was one of the
00:37:42.500people who couldn't do anything to save herself. She was in the wrong time at the wrong place and
00:37:48.260she was unable to save herself and we should feel upset about it because if we don't feel upset
00:37:53.320about things like that that happen in history then we feel less upset about things like that
00:37:57.720that happen now and of course we should feel engaged with those things that happen now it
00:38:02.200seems to me well yeah and especially in a in a current moment i mean here in in north america
00:38:08.920where the the attack on women's rights with people's bodily autonomy is so virulent it's the0.95
00:38:15.440same it's the same shit it's quite heartbreaking and i think really important to tell these0.97
00:38:21.800histories i think so i i think if we look back at the history of persecution we can see a lot0.99
00:38:29.380of analogies with the way that contemporary politics deals with groups who are not able
00:38:33.840to defend themselves. So I think that history can tell us a lot. We don't always learn from it,
00:38:39.220which is a very sad thing. We do keep repeating this stuff where we scapegoat and persecute each
00:38:45.100other. But at least we can tell the stories. At least good people can reflect upon them and
00:38:49.760hopefully feel a sense that this has happened before and things have been done about it. And
00:38:55.900people like Helena can fight back. And I think that's quite important.
00:38:59.460Yeah, we can. We can fight back. I want to open up the floor. Reid, do you want to jump in and start?
00:39:06.200Yes, thank you very much. I am a 30-year PhD student at the University of Georgia,
00:39:12.040and I am studying the history of witch trials. But my dissertation topic, which is related to
00:39:18.620this, is why women are leaving Christianity right now in America in mass to practice witchcraft.0.98
00:39:25.900And I am working on a project right now. I have discovered a woman in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a ghost story about a woman who was tried in an illegal trial for witchcraft.0.96
00:39:37.960She was kidnapped and taken to a plantation and was tried and let go. She was tortured.
00:39:45.040But she was able to secure a warrant from, I find this ironic, a Presbyterian minister.
00:39:51.700the ghost story says that she won in court but was never paid because her accuser fled for the
00:39:58.680frontier which at the time was alabama that sounds really interesting that's so i found that's really
00:40:04.560interesting why is i stumbled upon it in this ghost story but i've been to the archives in
00:40:12.040south carolina and what i found out is that she was a widow and was given a bunch of land and the
00:40:19.100two people who testified against her that we have record of were her son and her grandson.
00:40:24.340And six months after this trial, there is a land record of her deeding 100 acres to her grandson.
00:40:30.840So you can imagine what shape that ghost story has, can't you? Yeah. Oh, that's very interesting.
00:40:35.520Oh, I would encourage you to write about it. Obviously, you know, if this is something that
00:40:39.520you're studying already, please tell the world about it. That's great. And you know, I'm at the
00:40:43.960University of Exeter right in in in southwest England you know if you look out for for1.00
00:40:48.820opportunities there by all means think about coming there you know we do a lot of witchcraft
00:40:54.840and magic stuff at the university in terms of its history and its literature so there's yeah
00:41:00.500there's lots of ongoing stuff to talk about I'm sure but that's fascinating and I think one of
00:41:05.880the things you're talking about there is the way that stories live on so you know you may not always
00:41:12.280know exactly what happened historically in the past but the fact that somebody has cared enough
00:41:16.400to make a story about it is really important and I also you know I write about witchcraft in
00:41:22.180literature everything from Macbeth to the Harry Potter books I've written about you know the ways
00:41:27.360that witches are remembered in modern society so I think that's really interesting it's a really
00:41:32.280good field of research and there's an awful lot to say about it and if you found a case that
00:41:36.300nobody else is writing about wow tell everybody we'll make sure that you can find each other for
00:41:41.320sure and reed's research is so exciting we always love to get to hear updates from them i also while
00:41:48.560we have you for like two more minutes there's two other things in the chat i want to make sure
00:41:52.540to draw your attention to one is a question from sarah they're asking and i think this is such a
00:41:58.640fair question the numbers vary so widely in how many people were persecuted during the witch hunts
00:42:05.920those numbers are kind of all over the map and so sarah's wondering how many people were accused