‘The Witches of Warboys is a fascinating but neglected episode in the history
of English witch-trials. Using contemporary texts and parish records, Philip C.
Almond pieces together the story with scholarly diligence, investigative
determination, and the imagination of a dramatist. The result is an engrossing,
frame-by-frame tale of fear, prejudice and persecution in a rural parish, with
intriguing ramifications for the social and intellectual history of Elizabethan
England. There are ghosts, devils and demoniacs, bizarre dreams, afflictions
and accusations, harsh interrogations and sordid executions. Professor Almond
is a trustworthy guide into this lost world of belief and brutality, stripping
bare the alien cosmology and mentality of our tense and troubled ancestors.’
Malcolm Gaskill, Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Churchill
College, Cambridge, and author of Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches and
Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
‘This is a splendid case-study, of the classic kind that tells a gripping story in
order to illuminate major historical themes. The whole of Elizabethan
witchcraft is concentrated into a vivid consideration of one
Huntingdonshire trial and the events that led up to it. As the story unfolds, we
are confronted with the horrific double problem of how people can come to
believe in a monstrous untruth, and how they can persuade others to believe in
it as well. Psychology, history and literary criticism all meet in these pages, and
sixteenth-century demonology comes face to face with modern issues
surrounding the ability of interrogation methods to reveal or distort truths.
This is at once a compelling study of the thought world of Reformationperiod Protestantism and one of the timeless psychopathology of confession.
Philip Almond takes us quite literally to realms beyond reason, where the
only alternatives confronting an enquirer are demonic possession,
paranormal human powers or mental illness. Even if the truth of what
happened probably lies beyond any person now living, what this book does
establish, convincingly and disturbingly, is the universe of belief within which
such a tragedy can occur.’
Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol and author of
Witches, Druids and King Arthur and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of
Modern Pagan Witchcraft
‘The Witches of Warboys is one of those rare scholarly works that press
impeccable research into the service of a thumping good read. Eschewing the
usual ornate postmodern theories of Renaissance daemonomania, Philip C.
Almond articulates the Warboys tragedy with passion, compassion, and
exquisite erudition. The result is the single best witch-craze narrative to
appear in over a generation.
Darklady's Occult