Getting it wrong: the problems with reinventing the past
August 2020
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Journal article
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Pomegranate: the International Journal of Pagan studies
This article is an examination of recent best-selling fictions and television adaptations which portray the history of witchcraft, often using outmoded historical theses, and often falsifying the known life histories of actual convicted witches. This article argues that these fictions, marked by problematically eugenicist ideas of magic, and in one case by a very uncomfortable appropriation of the Holocaust, are ultimately unhelpful to Pagans because they falsify history and deny the real needs of the contemporary Pagan communities.
FFR
Managing our Darkest Hatreds and Fears
October 2019
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Journal article
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Athenaeum Review
Alone and palely questing
October 2019
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Journal article
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Times Literary Supplement
Review of Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth
FFR
Modern Witches and Their Past
September 2019
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Chapter
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The Witchcraft Reader
4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods
July 2019
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Book
Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures.
Literary Criticism
Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. d.49
March 2019
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Chapter
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The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 4705 Literary Studies
The Palate of Nations
September 2018
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Journal article
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Athenaeum Review
FFR
Women Poets of the English Civil War, etc
July 2018
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Review
Overshadowed:women of the Stuart period
February 2018
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Purkiss reviews White King: Charles 1--traitor, murderer, martyr by Leanda de Lisle and Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book: The life and times of a Civil War heroine by Lucy Moore: Almost ten years ago, David Starkey complained that Tudor history was being “feminised”. It’s good to see that the same thing is happening to Stuart history, for here are two fascinating new books about women during the Civil War. And yet one of these two books is ostensibly a biography of Charles I. Leanda de Lisle is best known as an early Tudor historian, so it makes sense that in her new biography she turns her attention to making Charles as glamorous as the Tudors. No biographer has ever succeeded in making this small, serious, deeply religious man attractive to the modern era. De Lisle’s is a gallant attempt, and Charles would appreciate her efforts to emphasize the prestige of his court and his enthusiasm for the arts, something we can see for ourselves at the new Royal Academy exhibition.
Review
Fractious: Teenage girls' tales in and out of shakespeare
November 2017
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Chapter
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Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts
English witches and SS academics: evaluating sources for the English witch trials in Himmler’s Hexenkartothek
April 2017
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Journal article
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Preternature
Prior to WWII, Himmler organised a team of SS researchers to collate records of historical witchcraft trials that had taken place in lands of the expanding Reich. The ideological pretext for this undertaking was the collection of evidence demonstrating an anti-German crusade by the Church. While this was a figment of historical imagination, the SS pursued it doggedly against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Whereas trials that had taken place on historically German lands were often sourced from primary documents to which the researchers had access within Reich libraries, trials further afield were less rigorously sourced. Little was done to differentiate between primary and secondary or even tertiary sources. One SS source for English witch trials was a text by a German-Jewish literary scholar about witchcraft in Renaissance drama. Such critical indifference on the part of the SS is thought by some to render the archive of little interest, but examining the ideological underpinnings of Nazi reception of these materials can help situate these researchers among the turbulent social and political structures of the Third Reich and its uneven privileging of the intellectual fringe. This also constitutes the first critical/biographical analysis in any language of the sources for the English trial cards in the catalogue.
witchcraft, Nazism and the occult, Hexenkartothek, witch trialswitch-cult in Europe, Himmler
Good as Gold
March 2017
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Good as gold
January 2017
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Review
Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye
November 2016
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Journal article
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Gramarye: The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy
Dining with the Tudors
May 2016
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Enchanting
February 2016
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Body crimes: The witches, lady macbeth and the relics
January 2016
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Chapter
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Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain: Literary and Historical Explorations
This chapter derives from a project aimed at studying the long-term history of violence in England. Its evidentiary base is drawn from materials amassed in the course of Economic and Social Research Council-funded project on the history of violence, and in particular homicide, in the county of Cheshire between 1600 and 1800, and from subsequent research into Cheshire sources. The chapter looks at the input of female observers and onlookers into cases where a woman was the victim of homicidal violence. It examines the input of women witnesses and other participants into what was the most normal form of fatal homicide in the period in question: male-on-male violence resulting in a fatality. If many of these incidents of male-on-male violence took place in alehouses, women were frequently present as proprietors, wives of proprietors or servants. As might be expected, the involvement of women is less pronounced in what was the most common form of non-infanticidal homicide in these Cheshire materials.
“As like Hermione as is her picture”: the shadow of incest in The Winter’s Tale
December 2015
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Chapter
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Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England
Shakespeare, Incest, Maternity
Women beware women
August 2015
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Charming Witches:
March 2014
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Journal article
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Preternature Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural
5004 Religious Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies
Body crimes: The witches, Lady Macbeth and the relics
January 2014
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Chapter
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Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain: Literary and Historical Explorations
The masque of food; staging and banqueting in Shakespeare’s England
January 2014
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Journal article
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Shakespeare Studies: an annual gathering of research, criticism and review
What Do Men Want? Satan, the Rake, and Masculine Desire
January 2014
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Chapter
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Milton Now
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Witchcraft in Early Modern Literature
March 2013
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Chapter
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The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America
History
Desire and its deformities: Fantasies of witchcraft in the English civil war
January 2013
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Chapter
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New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology: Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England
Magical Tales
January 2013
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Book
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)
November 2012
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Book
This popular history of the English Civil War tells the story of the bloody conflict between Oliver Cromwell and Charles I from the perspectives of those involved.
History
Marvell, Boys, Girls, and Men: Should we Worry?
January 2011
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Chapter
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Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood
Thinking of gender
December 2010
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 4705 Literary Studies, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Witchcraft and Deep Time–a debate at Harvard
September 2010
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Journal article
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Antiquity
4301 Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Anna Trapnel's Literary Geography
January 2010
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Chapter
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The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680
Crammed with Distressful Bread? Bakers and Poor in Early Modern London
January 2010
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Chapter
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Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories
The Marked Body
January 2010
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Chapter
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A Cultural HIstory of the Human Body in the Renaissance
Whose Liberty? The Rhetoric of Milton's Divorce Tracts
January 2009
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Chapter
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Oxford Handbook of Milton
What we leave out
December 2006
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War
July 2005
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Book
4705 Literary Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Introduction: Minding the story
January 2003
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Chapter
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Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760
This project originated from the exploration of historical and critical intersections concerning women of the early modern period staged in the Women, Text and History seminars which began in 1988 in Oxford. At those seminars, it became apparent that many of us were doing work which shared premises and problems: this book is a result.
Material girls: The seventeenth-century woman debate
January 2003
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Chapter
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Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760
The kind of attention paid collectively to the texts of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘woman debate’ signed with female names suggests that many critics understand feminism to be a relatively recognizable political and literary category which, though historically variable, is also visible across historical boundaries.1 This chapter explores the possibility that the identification of oppositional resistance as expressed by a single author may be a difficult matter historically; texts we recognize as feminist in our present circumstances might in their historical context represent not feminist univocality, but an awkward combination of contradictory speaking-positions such as the assumption of a negotiating stance on the terrain of politics, a subversive play with the question of gender in terms unfamiliar to modern feminism, and the production of femininity as a saleable commodity in the literary market. What we recognize in these texts may be the processing of woman as a theatrical role or masquerade which can never be equated with an essential woman or audible authorial voice but which, rather, troubles the very existence of such a self-identical figure. These are texts which cannot be put easily into categories of metaphor alone or categories of authentic voicing; instead, they are texts where the metaphors used to naturalize the gender systems of early modern England are both assaulted and upheld. I shall explore these speculations, and the anxieties that attend them, through a reading of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean texts signed by women. These include Jane Anger her Protection for Women (1589), A Mouzell for Melastomus, by Rachel Speght (1617), Ester hath Hang’d Haman, by Ester Sowernam (1617), The Worming of A Mad Dogge, by Constantia Munda (1617), and The Women’s Sharp Revenge, by Mary Tattle-well and Joan Hit-Him-Home (1640), but I shall be focusing particularly on the responses to Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Woman (1615), which include Speght, ‘Sowernam’ and ‘Munda’.2 These texts, I shall argue, pose a series of challenges to feminist reading practices which have never been fully addressed. Because they purport to be by women, they seem to offer a visible female self-consciousness about gender, a site upon which female agency is fully and openly displayed in a manner recognizable or nameable as feminism. In other words, they excite the desire to recognize the present in the past, to name what we can term our own history. But because what is at stake in these texts seems at first glance so familiar and understandable, it is possible that their estranging or culturally autonomous aspects may not be fully noticed; moreover, because they can so readily be situated in the context of gender politics, they are never fully situated in the political and discursive specificities of the early modern period.
Women, texts and histories 1575-1760
January 2003
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Book
The essays offer new feminist analysis of the early modern period and show how women's writing may undermine many of the received assumptions on which the history of the period has depended.
Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories
January 2001
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Book
The Children of Medea: Euripides, Louise Woodward, and Deborah Eappen
June 1999
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Journal article
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Law and Literature
Blood, sacrifice, marriage: why iphigeneia and mariam have to die
March 1999
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Journal article
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Women's Writing
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies, 36 Creative Arts and Writing
The Witch in History
September 1996
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Book
Witchcraft
Women's Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the Body, the Child
November 1995
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Journal article
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Gender & History
4405 Gender Studies, 4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society
Fingers in the pie: baked meats, adultery, and adulteration
Chapter
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Organic Supplements: Bodies, Objects and the Natural World, 1580-1750