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Witchcraft, as most commonly understood in both historical and present-day communities, is the use of alleged supernatural powers of magic. A witch is a practitioner of witchcraft. Traditionally, "witchcraft" means the use of magic or supernatural powers to inflict harm or misfortune on others, and this remains the most common and widespread meaning. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "Witchcraft thus defined exists more in the imagination of contemporaries than in any objective reality. Yet this stereotype has a long history and has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world." The belief in witchcraft has been found in a great number of societies worldwide. Anthropologists have applied the English term "witchcraft" to similar beliefs in occult practices in many different cultures, and societies that have adopted the English language have often internalised the term.
A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East. In medieval Europe, witch-hunts often arose in connection to charges of heresy from Christianity. An intensive period of witch-hunts occurring in Early Modern Europe and to a smaller extent Colonial America, took place about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Counter Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 executions. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other regions, like Africa and Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea, and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia and Cameroon today.
Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.
The North Berwick witch trials were the trials in 1590 of a number of people from East Lothian, Scotland, accused of witchcraft in the St Andrew's Auld Kirk in North Berwick on Halloween night. They ran for two years, and implicated over 70 people. These included Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, on charges of high treason.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar.
John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book.
Angus Peter Campbell is a Scottish award-winning poet, novelist, journalist, broadcaster and actor. Campbell's works, which are written mainly in Scottish Gaelic, draw heavily upon both Hebridean mythology and folklore and the magic realism of recent Latin American literature. In an interview prior to his death, Sorley MacLean, who is with Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair one of the two greatest writers in the history of Scottish Gaelic literature, called Campbell one of the best living Scottish poets in any language.
Ruth Manning-Sanders was an English poet and author born in Wales, known for a series of children's books for which she collected and related fairy tales worldwide. She published over 90 books in her lifetime
European witchcraft is a multifaceted historical and cultural phenomenon that unfolded over centuries, leaving a mark on the continent's social, religious, and legal landscapes. The roots of European witchcraft trace back to classical antiquity when concepts of magic and the supernatural were interwoven into societal beliefs. Ancient Rome, then a pagan society, had laws against harmful magic. During the Middle Ages, misogynist views of women led to the association of women and malevolent witchcraft, as accusations of heresy and devil worship grew more prevalent. By the early modern period, major witch hunts began to take place, partly fueled by religious tensions, societal anxieties, and economic upheaval. Witches were viewed as dangerous sorceresses or sorcerers in a pact with the Devil, capable of causing harm through black magic.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet's Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
Cerridwen Fallingstar, is an American Wiccan priestess, shamanic witch, and author. Since the late 1970s she has written, taught, and lectured about magic, ritual, and metaphysics, and is considered a leading authority on pagan witchcraft.
In early modern Scotland, in between the early 16th century and the mid-18th century, judicial proceedings concerned with the crimes of witchcraft took place as part of a series of witch trials in Early Modern Europe. In the late middle age there were a handful of prosecutions for harm done through witchcraft, but the passing of the Witchcraft Act 1563 made witchcraft, or consulting with witches, capital crimes. The first major issue of trials under the new act were the North Berwick witch trials, beginning in 1590, in which King James VI played a major part as "victim" and investigator. He became interested in witchcraft and published a defence of witch-hunting in the Daemonologie in 1597, but he appears to have become increasingly sceptical and eventually took steps to limit prosecutions.
Catherine Lucy Czerkawska, is a Scottish-based novelist and playwright. She has written many plays for the stage and for BBC Radio 4 and has published numerous novels and short stories. Wormwood – about the Chernobyl disaster – was produced at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1997, while her novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize in 2005.
Dr Jenni Fagan FRSL is a Scottish novelist and poet. She has written several books including fiction novel The Panopticon, screenplays and several books of poetry. She was named Scottish writer of the year 2016 by The Glasgow Herald. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Gillian K. Ferguson is a Scottish poet and journalist, born and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the creator of Air for Sleeping Fish (Bloodaxe) and the best-seller, Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. She won a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award and created a major poetry project exploring the human genome called The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life, About her project, she said, "the Genome has remained fascinating throughout; a fantastic, beautiful poem - a magnificent work of Chemistry spanning four billion years of the art of Evolution." The project was praised, including by broadcaster, Andrew Marr of the BBC, Francis Collins, Head of the US Human Genome Project and by philosopher Mary Midgley author of Science and Poetry (Routledge).
Pippa Goldschmidt is a British fiction writer, formerly based in Edinburgh, Scotland but now living in Germany.
Witch trials and witch related accusations were at a high during the early modern period in Britain, a time that spanned from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century.
Louise Yeoman is a historian and broadcaster specialising in the Scottish witch hunts and 17th century Scottish religious beliefs.
Kirstie Blair, FRSE is Dean of Arts and Humanities at Stirling University and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021. She specialises in Victorian literature and the working class writing, poetry and literature, and working with museums and industrial heritage sites to engage the community around them. Her book Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community' won the Saltire Society Book of the Year and Research Book of the Year awards in 2019.
References
- ↑ "The Staff :: Edinburgh Stage Management School". www.edinburghstagemanagementschool.co.uk. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
- ↑ "Alice Tarbuck". Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
- ↑ "Life as a modern-day witch? Author Alice Tarbuck shares her magic secrets". HeraldScotland. 31 October 2020. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
- 1 2 Tarbuck, Alice (2021). A spell in the wild : a year (and six centuries) of magic. London. ISBN 978-1-5293-8086-6. OCLC 1263817058.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ↑ "A Spell in the Wild : A Year (and six centuries) of Magic by Alice Tar". Golden Hare Books. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
- ↑ "Author: Alice Tarbuck". Scottish Book Trust. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
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