The History of Witchcraft Course

with Dr Jennifer Farrell

Magic and witchcraft are not the same thing. Jennifer explains how the crime of witchcraft — harmful magic plus devil-worship — only emerged in the 14th and 15th centuries, and how historians think about the far older, everyday “common tradition” of magic. She explores divination, healing charms and love magic (menstrual blood and cockerel spells included), and why, from the Icelandic sagas to Morgan le Fay, magic came to be seen as a woman’s weapon.

• The difference between magic and witchcraft
• How historians think about medieval magic
• Divination, healing and love magic in everyday life
• Why magic came to be seen as a woman’s weapon

with Dr Jennifer Farrell

How did the medieval Church go from quiet penance to persecution? Jennifer traces the rise of the Inquisition and the universities, then the all-male “learned” magic of clerics who conjured demons from protective circles — and how it gave the Inquisition its reason to treat magic as heresy. She follows the story through the Knights Templar and the Toulouse inquisition records to the witches’ sabbath, and explains why the Malleus Maleficarum and village accusations made witchcraft a female crime.

• How the medieval Church moved from penance to persecution
• Necromancy and the “clerical underworld” of learned magic
• How heresy trials created the witches’ sabbath
• Why witchcraft became a crime of women

with Dr Tabitha Stanmore

Step into an English village in 1510, where God, the devil and the fairies are all real. Drawing on her database of around 650 cases, Tabitha shows what people actually used magic for — fortune-telling, healing, catching thieves, love spells and buried treasure (“the early modern version of winning the lottery”) — and who the cunning folk who sold it were. She then explains what the Church and the witchcraft Acts of 1542, 1563 and 1604 really made illegal, and why cunning folk were so rarely punished.

• Daily life in a world full of the supernatural
• What magic was used for, and how spells worked
• Who the cunning folk were, with real case studies
• What the law actually said about magic

with Prof Diane Purkiss

In 16th- and 17th-century Scotland, many people believed a beautiful, dangerous fairy otherworld lay alongside their own — and the witch trials, in trying to recast fairies as demons, preserved their stories. Diane reads the ballad of Tam Lin, then tells the extraordinary trial stories of Bessie Dunlop, Alison Pearson, Andrew Man, who claimed to be the fairy queen’s lover, and Isobel Gowdie, asking what fairy belief did for people living with grief, trauma and fear.

• The Scottish fairy otherworld, and the ballad of Tam Lin
• The fairy witches of the Scottish trials, in their own words
• How Scotland’s witch trials worked, and why they were so harsh
• What fairy belief meant for grief, desire and fear

with Dr Tabitha Stanmore

Tabitha explains how English witchcraft law and trials worked, and why conviction rates were usually low — until 1645. She sets out the pressures that made East Anglia a tinderbox, from the Civil War and heavy taxes to the Little Ice Age and herring piracy, then follows Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne through a hunt that accused around 300 people, meets some of the accused, and asks whether it would have happened without them.

• How witchcraft was prosecuted in England
• Why 1640s East Anglia was ripe for a witch hunt
• Matthew Hopkins, John Stearne and their methods
• The lives of the people who were accused

with Dr Julia Phillips

Julia traces the birth of modern Pagan witchcraft, or Wicca: its literary roots in The Golden Bough and Aradia, Margaret Murray’s flawed witch-cult theory, and the end of the Witchcraft Act after the trial of Helen Duncan. She introduces Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Sybil Leek and the figures who spread the Craft, and brings the story up to WitchTok, the census and today.

• The books and theories that inspired modern witchcraft
• Gerald Gardner and the founding of Wicca
• Doreen Valiente, Sybil Leek and the Craft’s growth
• Witchcraft today, from museums to WitchTok

with Dr Julia Phillips

The final module follows the witch on screen, from silent films and the earliest Wizard of Oz to Disney, the 1939 green-faced Wicked Witch and the charming witches of Bell, Book and Candle. Julia moves on to television and Bewitched, the satanic panic of the 1980s and the teenage witches of the 1990s, and ends with Harry Potter — showing how screen witches tracked the rise of real-life modern witchcraft.

• Witches in silent film and the Land of Oz
• Hollywood’s witches, from Disney to Rosemary’s Baby
• Bewitched, Buffy, Sabrina and the teenage witch
• Harry Potter and the witch as a moral choice