Detfri slave of Herennius Sattius
Signed with a footprint

Amica slave of Herennius
Signed when
We were placing the tile

The women’s footprints, and these inscriptions, are the only trace that they ever existed.

Amy Richlin includes this trace in her book, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women, because for most Roman women all we have is silence. And not just Roman women. Janina Ramirez’s new book Femina sets out to tell the history of the Middle Ages, “through”, as the subtitle puts it, “the women written out of it” — or never written in. The vast majority of people who have ever lived were illiterate and disenfranchised: they left no autographical sign of their existence and were simply not powerful or privileged enough to have their perspective represented in the documentary sources that survive. This is especially true of women.

The survivors who present themselves to a feminist historian are the exceptions. Ramirez tells the story of the thrilling post-Second World War mission to preserve the Reisencodex: the priceless manuscript that contains nearly all the collected writings of the extraordinary theologian, composer, and scientist Hildegard of Bingen; we have her surviving correspondence with three popes, King Henry II of England and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. And there’s Margery Kempe, whose book — only rediscovered in 1934 — tells her life as she narrated it to three scribes. (“Although not written down in her own hand,” says Ramirez, “this is the closest we can get to hearing a medieval woman speak to us from six centuries ago”.)

Those scribes were men, meaning even feminist histories must depend on male authorship. Almost everything we know about Eadburh, eighth-century queen of the West Saxons, comes from Bishop Asser’s biography of Alfred the Great, in which he casts her as the archetypal evil woman: tyrannical, murderous, both a cock-tease and a whore. Even Hildegard was edited by a man, Gebeno of Eberbach, whose decontextualised versions of her words were circulated far more widely than her own manuscripts.

For most women, though, what we know about them amounts to — at most — fragments. This creates problems for feminist historians. “Very few [historians] begin discussions of the Bayeux Tapestry thinking about the women who made it,” Ramirez observes, because we don’t know who they were or where they were.

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To find women, Ramirez suggests, we must move beyond texts. For the early Middle Ages especially, restoring women to history involves triangulating findings from archaeology, osteoarchaeology, material culture and DNA. This means the close examination of surviving stuff — the bed burials of early medieval noblewomen, the so-called Loftus Princess’s gold and cloisonné jewels, or Jadwiga of Poland’s fourteenth-century ivory casket. In the case of the Loftus Princess, buried in a seventh-century grave where bone, wood, and fabric have disintegrated, her jewels — including one large pendant set in gold, with a scallop-shaped garnet surrounded by rows of gemstones — indicate both her status and, probably, her gender.

Ramirez also tells the story of the two people buried in style on a ninth-century ship in Tønsburg, Norway with every conceivable item “from enameled buckets to dog collars”: what a joy to discover, through bone analysis, that these fêted individuals were an elderly and a middle-aged woman respectively. Why two women were buried with such honour remains a mystery. It turns ideas about the masculine machismo of Viking society on their head.

DNA analysis in 2017 also caused surprise by revealing the tenth-century Birka warrior — who was buried with an axe, two shields, a spear, and a sword — to be a woman. She was not the only female warrior: the most famous queen of the Saxons, Ætheflæd, Lady of Mercia, was a military leader. And, according to isotope analysis, by Dr Cat Jarman, of the remaining bones of 264 individuals from the so-called Great Heathen (Viking) army, some 20% of the Viking army were women too.

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Numismatics can also help the feminist historian: the eighth-century Queen of the Mercians, Cynethryth, wife of Offa, is depicted on coins, as is Irene, Emperor of Constantinople. Jadwiga was a female King of Poland, just as, three centuries later, Christina became a 17th-century King of Sweden; if you want to borrow men’s status, you sometimes have to borrow male terms.

Nevertheless, women who have enough burial stuff to be identified in death, were, like the women on coins, nearly always women of status. When it comes to writing the histories of these elite, well-known women, there is the further danger of hagiography — either because they have literally been canonised, like Hildegard and Jadwiga, or because, as in Jadwiga’s case, they have become secular saints hijacked for nationalist purposes. Ramirez is alive to the dangers of writing about exceptional individuals but doesn’t always go far enough to avoid them. One of her solutions is to offer brief parallels, for example, to show “that there was more than one twelfth-century woman challenging the status quo”.

And here another pitfall lies. The discovery by the University of Stockholm that the Birka warrior was a woman was immediately subject to scholarly scepticism and popular disbelief. This reaction says much about how we project onto the past — but all of us who search for people other than rich white men in history must refrain from an equally strong temptation to project: the temptation to romanticise. As Stephanie Smallwood puts it, we have to recognise our desire “for the subaltern [to be a] heroic actor whose agency triumphs over the forces of oppression”. Of course, we want women in the past to have defied the patriarchy and come up top — but most didn’t.

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Romanticisation shades into a desire to portray exceptional women as in some ways representative. Ramirez suggests that Kempe gives us a glimpse of “an ordinary married woman, mother to fourteen children”, but the weeping, wailing visionary is not very ordinary, and, as Ramirez points out, Kempe’s book says next to nothing about those children. This absence of insight into the historical experience of mothering is not unusual but — given that motherhood was a near-universal experience before the advent of reliable contraception — it is startling. The cradle-side experience was, in the view of Sarah Knott, either considered too mundane to be written down or went unrecorded because women whose hands were too full of children had neither the time nor the ability to pick up a quill.

Ramirez is strongest when on her home ground of the early Middle Ages. For the late medieval period, the pursuit of ordinary women requires the reading of manuscript evidence against the grain. Court records have produced rich results: analysis of the trial of Alice Kyteler in 1324, the first condemned witch in Ireland, or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s account of the Inquisition’s interrogations of male and female Cathars in southern France in his Montaillou (1975). He examined the worldview of Pyrenean villagers between 1294 and 1324 through the testimonies that they gave to Bishop Jacques Fournier, producing chapters called “Body language and sex”, “Marriage and the condition of women”, “Concepts of time and space”, and “Fate, magic, and salvation”. Some of Ladurie’s handling of his material does not show the care and critical analysis with which later historians have treated depositions, but his findings still provide compelling insights into the lives of ordinary women and men.

There are women in the criminal records from the Court of the King’s Bench; they are also to be found in wills, petitions, household accounts, and medical texts — annotated, or sometimes even composed by, women. Monica Green edited and translated the Trotula, an amazing collection of medieval medical and cosmetic advice for women. Louise Wilkinson (whose Twitter handle is, incidentally, @MedievalFemina) drew on charters, chronicles, government records and early manorial court rolls to examine the experiences of noble- and gentlewomen, urban women, peasant women, and criminal women in thirteenth-century Lincolnshire. Rachel Delman used tapestries to examine ritual in the fifteenth-century household headed by Alice Chaucer, while Jessica Barker has written about the tomb effigies of the Middle Ages to explore gender, marriage, and emotion. And that’s just to scratch the surface.

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So the medieval women that Ramirez has reappraised are not exactly common or garden. She has, still, re-examined a handful of influential women in the easy-to-read, enthusiastic prose that is her hallmark. Femina is demotic in style: things “languish” in archives, villages are always “sleepy”, and Ramirez uses the present tense for drama, whether in 1077 or 1983. Troubadours are the “medieval equivalent of touring rock stars”, creatures in the margins of psalters are “lookalikes of… Yoda and Gandalf”. Perhaps most surprisingly, “medieval pilgrimage was like our modern-day package holidays”.

This is deliberate, for this is as much a book about our interactions with the past as it is about the past itself. It is in the nature of feminist history to have an agenda. Richlin acknowledged that, “in telling women’s stories, I am working toward a society that remembers women”. Saidiya Hartman explains that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past… The past depends less on ‘what happened then’ than on the desires and discontents of the present”. Ramirez is upfront about the way her work is representative of our current age; still, it raises broader questions about the perils of letting the present weigh too heavily on the past.

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Is it helpful for modern doctors and psychiatrists to analyse Hildegard’s visions, nine centuries on, to see “whether they indicate underlying medical or mental health issues”? Ramirez concludes that “it was highly probable she was experiencing migraines”; later, this is a certainty: “her whole body was affected by the migraines”. Elsewhere, she explains Hildegard’s visions away by reference to the menopause. Margery Kempe, we’re told, might be diagnosed today as schizophrenic, epileptic or psychotic. Ramirez notes that some of Kempe’s contemporaries suggested epilepsy too — but these were her detractors, mocking her.

Being driven by the inequalities and injustices of our day to search for our ancestors in history is noble, but it isn’t easy. Men have been the powerful and the privileged for so long; to unbury the dead, feminist historians need to do some heavy lifting. But have we become so blinkered by the present that we cannot approach the past on its own terms? If the ideas in Hildegard’s visions were taken seriously by the powerful men who were her contemporaries but not by feminist historians — then who is writing whom out of history?

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

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Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

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Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

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This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

This piece was originally published in May.

Given that New England’s ideas about witches had been imported from the old country, the trials shared characteristics: illnesses that could not be explained, except by magic; familiars — demons in animal form — sucking on witches’ bodies; victims being tormented from afar, via apparitions or dreams (this “spectral evidence” would later dominate at the famous Salem witch trials). Both trials, too, have much to teach us about rationality and its limits, the power of collective opinion, and the psychology that leads people to identify others — and themselves — as evil.

The story of the Parsons is told in Malcolm Gaskill’s magnificent new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (out 4th November). Hugh and Mary were among the 25,000 Puritans who fled to New England in the seventeenth century to build a Promised Land. Both settled in Springfield, a town unusual in Massachusetts because it had at its heart not only a godly enterprise, but also a commercial one: its founder William Pynchon ran a trade in furs, buying them from the Native Americans they called Indians and sending them on to London.

Gaskill vividly evokes the reality of early colonial life, from the voyage in the crammed, low-ceilinged hold of a pitching ship — the reek of unwashed bodies, the snoring and bickering of other passengers — through to the sheer hard labour that made up their lives on land — the unremitting work of felling timber, breaking rocks, digging drains, mowing grass, tending cattle, chopping firewood, slaughtering pigs, clearing chimneys, sweeping floors, and on and on.

Their external struggle with nature was matched by internal wrestling: Puritan theology required its adherents to be gravely introspective. Gaskill describes it as a “strained, oppositional way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation.” As frontier neighbours, they were completely dependent on each other (and literally indentured to Pynchon), yet the contemplation of their own sins led quickly to the censure of others. And if the melancholy, constant toil and endless self-doubt were not enough, this was a society facing the constant, terrible death of beloved young children.

In this fraught environment, the accusations of 1651 settled on Parsons — an ambitious man whose eyes seemed full of sullen envy — and his wife — who talked too much of witches. The evidence of their witchcraft could be seen in many incidents — trivial in themselves but creating a cumulative, attritional effect: trowels and knives went missing and mysteriously reappeared; the making of a pudding repeatedly failed; people received night-time visitations from snakes or a small boy with a face as red as fire, while others suffered fits and convulsions; a two-year-old saw a spectral dog; and, above all, children were bewitched to death. All these incidents occurred after the victims had crossed the Parsons.

Gaskill’s finely tuned story unfolds less like your average history book and more like a Stephen King novel, building such a convincing sense of the mounting tension that it is possible to see why the inhabitants of Springfield came to believe that this must incontrovertibly be witchcraft — and yet also why their inferences were disbelieved by the court in Boston. The journey from enchantment to disenchantment was a mere 90 miles. What is collective and rational and what is unconvincing and marginal depends largely on where one is standing.

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Perhaps it’s surprising to discover that scepticism was less in evidence 30 years later, where the accusations of Bideford carried undiminished to the court at Exeter. In The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition (out last week), John Carrow meticulously explores the haunting tale of the Bideford witches: three women who were accused of witchcraft chiefly, he argues, because of “their poverty in the midst of plenty”. People don’t like to be reminded of their privilege. Temperance Lloyd was probably an abandoned wife, left without resources; the widowed Susanna Edwards, who had lost children, came from a family tarred by a history of unwed births; and Mary Trembles is seldom granted her own identity in the records Carrow has painstakingly trawled, suggesting her physical and mental dependency. All three were long-term recipients of the dole and begged for their living.

One thing that sets the Bideford witches’ case apart from the Parsons’ is that theirs was a story of emotional discrepancies between people of different economic status. Susanna Edwards’ visits to beg for food at the door of John Barnes’ house were seen by Barnes’ wife as “frivolous”; soon she was an alleged victim of Edwards’ witchcraft. Parsons, too, bothered people by turning up without obvious purpose — on “sleeveless errands” — but for New England the “most sensitive fault-lines,” Gaskill observes, “lay between near neighbours of similar status.” Yet even between the New Englanders, envy and perceived envy was at the root of accusations. Fear also, writes Gaskill, “incubated guilt, which was projected and returned as anger — much as colonists in New England imputed their own aggression to Indians, easing their own consciences and justifying drastic counter-measures”. In the New World, witches were not the only Other.

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In 1680s England, the monarchy had recently been restored, bringing with it an Anglican regime. In Bideford, a substantial proportion of the population were nonconformist or Puritan, but now had to put up with an Anglican rector who drank, swore and extorted. Just when the witch trials hit, the Puritans had little in the way of responsible leadership, and that would turn out to matter.

The case against the three women started with an encounter in September 1681 between Lloyd and a sick woman called Grace Thomas. In attempting to appear kind and concerned, Lloyd instead seemed overfamiliar and intrusive. That evening, Thomas experienced “sticking, pricking pains”. These continued for months, and her memory of the conversation with Lloyd took on a sinister tone. A stray cat left a doll on her bed: the cat was deemed to be a witch’s familiar, the doll a poppet used to direct the stabbing pains to her body. A magpie that flew confusedly into Thomas’s sick chamber appeared as invasive as the beggar woman: it was thought to be another imp, acting on his mistress’s bidding. Both cat and bird, unwelcome visitors who scavenged for food and lived in the alleyways and fringes of the town, were reminiscent of the sinister figure of the beggar and, by equating them, Thomas was effectively dehumanising Lloyd.

She could because Lloyd already had a reputation as a witch and had even been tried — though acquitted. This past run-in with the law laid the groundwork for her later condemnation, for it meant that the respectable matrons of Bideford had once before searched her naked body for a “witch’s mark” or a teat on which a demon could suck. When they examined her again in 1682 — the violation far more genuinely invasive than the charges against her — they found what had not been there before: “two Teats hanging nigh together like a piece of flesh had suckt … in her Secret Parts … each … about an Inch in length.” What Carrow suggests might have been cervical polyps — not uncommon in menopausal women who have had children — was thought to be evidence that Lloyd had been feeding diabolic imps.

Lloyd herself quickly confessed to a devilish pact and to causing sickness with witchcraft. But she couldn’t get her story right: the familiars seemed to have control over her rather than the other way around; she had no grudge against her victim. The devil appeared not as a handsome man dressed in black, but as a creature (“about the length of her Arm”), with very big eyes, that capered, hopped, and leapt before her; he failed to entice her with promises of wealth and power.

What motivated Lloyd’s confession? She was highly suggestible, for one thing, and eager to please. But there was also potential satisfaction in appropriating one’s reputation as a witch (as many self-describing witches are finding today). Carrow suggests that Lloyd came to assume the identity that her neighbours had assigned to her because owning it gave power to a woman who had formerly been powerless. Thinking of herself as a witch made her feared and able to extract more charity. But the disguise came at a price: she came to believe it was real, and with that came guilt and shame, and an inability to defend herself convincingly. Mary Parsons, who claimed for some time that she was a witch, too, also experienced guilt, though Gaskill wonders if it slipped into the dangerous “thrill of notoriety”.

Mental ill-health was very obviously at play. Mary Parsons suffered from severe postnatal depression — possibly even postpartum psychosis. All three witches from Bideford were noted to be slipping into depression during their imprisonment — but it was only viewed as a further symptom of demonic suggestion. A later account by Roger North described them as “miserable old creatures that … were scarce alive; but were overwhelmed with melancholy, and waking dreams, and so stupid as no one could suppose they knew either the construction or consequence of what they said.” Another commentator said that they appeared “weary of their lives”.

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In this age, on the cusp of the Enlightenment, much responsibility lay with authority figures who could validate or dismiss fears of witchcraft. In Bideford, every unexplained ailment that later became part of the evidence of witchcraft had first been suggested by a doctor or apothecary to be of unnatural origin. The town’s Anglican ministers, in an unusual annotation, wrote “bewitched” in the parish register when Lydia Burman died in 1672 — a clear sign that they believed in the reality of witches.

Much also came down to the application of the law, for witchcraft was a crime and had to be proved as such. And here the Justices of the Peace in Bideford abrogated their responsibilities, by allowing the gathering of all pre-trial evidence to be conducted by the alleged witches’ chief accusers. In gaol, Lloyd was questioned by Grace Thomas’s sister and brother-in-law without the supervision of authorities. It was to them that she confessed to having met the devil and having tried to destroy Thomas by witchcraft. We do not know, therefore, “how many of her recorded words were actually her own.” Edwards was questioned by a man called John Dunning, about whom we know little: he did not give sworn testimony, and his questioning was reported second-hand by one Joane Jones, whose husband claimed to experience spectral tormenting by Edwards. We don’t know what she made up.

But it is clear that the accused assented to much that was put to them, even when it did not make sense. There were so many slips in the chronology and inconsistencies in the substance of what the women confessed that had anyone cared to cross-examine, analyse and pick apart their testimonies — if anyone had cared, in short, if they were innocent — then the huge holes would quickly have been exposed. No one spoke in their defence while they “talked themselves”, said North, “to the gallows”. The alternative — recognising how melancholy, pain and madness shaped their testimonies — meant taking on the responsibility of their keeping. It is often easier to condemn the vulnerable than to care for them.

By contrast, in Springfield Pynchon did not interpose his own views as he gathered testimonies about the Parsons. Nor did he take sides. The court in Boston listened to the depositions of 30 witnesses, though only seven were present, which made a material difference: undistracted by passionate speeches, the bench could easily sift the stuff of evidentiary substance from the “hotchpotch of trivia”. Under Massachusetts law, a witch was one who had made a pact with the devil and, while there was much that was suspicious surrounding the Parsons, it was hard to discern proof of a diabolic covenant.

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The trouble with witchcraft is that it was a “slippery crime, suspended between fantasy and reality, credulity and scepticism,” writes Gaskill. Now, some might think that believing in magic as absurd, but Carrow is at pains to stress its rationality in the seventeenth century. Gaskill similarly notes that we need to approach witchcraft as witchcraft and not as fraud, hysteria or delusion. Besides, belief and doubt are not quite as distinct as we might think. Even those who believed in witchcraft doubted, and those who doubted believed.

Giving testimony that would lead to one’s neighbour being hanged required the overcoming of one’s inherent doubt. This is why Gaskill concludes, citing Marina Warner, that “people believed what they heard, less in spite of its outlandishness than because of it”. What was being believed had to be sufficiently awful to contemplate, in turn, the awfulness of what might result from accusing someone. If you chant “witch!” loudly enough, you can drown out your misgivings. And you need to chant it with others for it to become true.

While both historians are keen to stress the non-hysterical nature of witchcraft charges, Carrow notes that the women of Bideford were questioned in “an atmosphere more akin to a bear-pit than a courtroom” and could not be acquitted for fear of mob reprisals. It is also evident that the weight of collective opinion can create guilt. Pynchon had prosecuted an earlier solo accusation of witchcraft as defamation, but when more than half the town had joined the chorus, reason dictated there must be something in it.

There is much of obvious parallel to today — the echo chambers of social media, the credibility of extreme fake news, the harshness of the judgements we make on the poor, on migrants, on our “Others.” But, quoting Peter Laslett, Gaskill reminds us that “only by taking the strange on its own terms can we understand ourselves in time”. It is that which contrasts with today that lends us understanding, not just that which is familiar; it is in deeply absorbing the realities of our predecessors’ lives — as witchcraft depositions, well handled, can help us to do — that we can perceive the otherness of the past and look more dispassionately on our own place in history.

The terrorists’ intention had been to kidnap the President but, at the last moment, he had cried off and stayed at home to watch his favourite soap-opera. So instead, the terrorists put all the guests — later whittled down to just the men and Coss — under house-arrest. What follows is the slow unfurling of life under siege, or what Alex Clark described as “long stretches of incarcerated ennui.”

Though I had been held hostage by germs not guerrillas — and with my family, not strangers — this mood felt familiar when I picked up Bel Canto over the summer. Incarcerated ennui is one way of describing our basic shared state during lockdown. The four months that the hostages remain in the vice-presidential house, largely confined to a single room, is in one sense present “a vast ocean of time” for the hostages, who are:

largely unfamiliar with the concept of free time. The ones who were very rich stayed at their offices late into the evening. They sat in the backseats of cars and dictated letters while their drivers shepherded them home. The ones who were young and very poor worked just as hard albeit at a different kind of work.

But, “now a great, unfamiliar idleness had fallen on them.”

Hosokawa starts to learn Spanish, committing himself to memorising ten nouns a day and one verb, fully conjugated. His diligence reminded me of those (economically privileged) people who responded to the novelty of lockdown by conjuring sourdough starters and gardening. So many of us found solace in the reassuring rhythms of repetitive projects; perhaps they reminded us of school. Indeed, there was a childlike enthusiasm — among the childless, at least — to make the most of the first lockdown.

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Confinement turns Patchett’s hostages into children, too: it gives them time to play, to learn about themselves. One of the teenage hostages turns out to have a very good operatic voice. Tetsuya Kato, a slightly built, greying numbers man at Hosokawa’s company, is revealed to be an exquisite pianist and Coss’s natural accompanist. Ruben Iglesias, the Vice-President, discovers that he “had been taken care of for too long,” and derives great satisfaction from becoming everyone’s houseboy. “Perhaps he had been useful in society,” he reflects, but “he had received no domestic training.” Lockdown domesticated many hitherto high-flying yet impractical individuals, just as, for Ruben, “it had taken a state of captivity to force him to figure out the operation of his own washer and dryer.” There was a choice involved, though: “Of course Ruben could have let it all go … He could have watched the carpets molder in pools of spilled soda pop and stepped around the trash.” How many of us were tempted, to do just that?

The positive self-actualisation of the characters reflects the novel’s tone; as one reviewer put it, it is less Lord of the Flies and more Lord of the Butterflies. It is optimistic, premised on the idea that captivity with others will ultimately produce a civilising effect — and will draw out qualities that would have gone unrecognised in the hostages’ normal lives. Like children on an interminable summer holiday, they start by being bored and listless, but then grow inventive and find creative roles that make the most of their talents. But for the privileged, in lockdown, it was the opposite. The second lockdown, without the backdrop of that glorious spring, challenged the enthusiasm for new projects; people grew frustrated at the monotony and claustrophobia. Bored of playing, stuck at home, we sulked like children, insulated from the world.

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Those with children, though, had a radically different experience. Like Hosokawa’s translator, Gen — the one person in Bel Canto who finds himself with more to do rather than less — parents found, in lockdown, that time became not an ocean but a pathetic, parched trickle: home-schooling, relentless meal preparation, constant supervision. The only faint compensation was that the world took notice, for a moment, to the enormous burden that is care. Stay-at-home parents, carers, and cleaners had a moment of vindication: behold, you mighty, and despair!

We are all in the same boat, went the spiel. Confinement unites the hostages. But Coss — with whom all the men, apparently not a single homosexual among them, have fallen in love — is granted the luxury of a bedroom upstairs, with a deep soft bed, while the men bunk down on the floor — finding a place on the rug if they can, on the cold marble floor if they cannot. They, and we, may have been adrift on the same sea, but some were in dinghies, and some were in yachts.

Still, for all of us, lockdown changed our relationship to time. Every life was on hold. Mark O’Connell, author of Notes From An Apocalypse, described lockdown as “a collapse of the experience of time, and of the sense of its meaning,” and reckoned in April that “the flatness of the days, the endless sameness, is building towards some cumulative emotional effect and we have not yet begun to take the measure of it.”

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For those confined in the VP’s house, their time outside of time is like a fairy tale. Teenage rebels raised in one-room huts learn to read and cook; hostages fall in love; one young guerrilla becomes like a son to Iglesias. The power of the bel canto — the beauty of Coss’s voice — weaves a spell that makes many of the hostages dream that their state could continue forever, that they could just stay in the big house with the beautiful singing and food brought to their door. Hosokawa has “never been so alive and so much a ghost.”

But, like all things faerie, this enchanted world is an illusion. It is not the President’s soap-opera. The hostages and the terrorists — for whom we also start to care — are in a situation in which there is no possibility of a happy ending, and yet we fantasise one with them. While “Mr. Hosokawa was overwhelmed by love, he could never completely shake what he knew to be the truth: that every night they were together could be seen as a miracle,” because “at some point these days would end, would be ended for them.” Even as “he wished he could stop time,” “he understood that these were extraordinary times, and if their old life was ever restored to them, nothing would be the same.” The hostages must grow up all over again, and re-enter their old and separate worlds — which look completely unfamiliar.

It might feel counterintuitive to look to history for insight into the end of the world — because, of course, we’re still here and the world clearly didn’t end when our ancestors thought it would. But if this past year has shown us anything, it’s that certain historic fears — of pestilence and pandemics, for instance — were not misplaced.

So, let us turn to Albrecht Dürer’s extraordinary woodcut of 1498, which depicts Four Horsemen. They ride with a wild fury. Their weapons are raised, their steeds gallop. Before and beneath them people cower and fall. They trample all in their path. The image is an illustration of the Book of the Revelation of St John, also known as the Apocalypse.

In chapter six, it describes four horses of different colours. On a white horse rides a crowned archer who sets out to conquer. On a red horse sits a rider bearing a great sword who is granted the right to take peace from the earth. The black horse’s rider holds a pair of scales. And he who sits on the final, pale (from the Latin pallor) horse — depicted by Dürer as skeletal and wizen — has the name Death (think of Clint Eastwood’s 1985 film Pale Rider).

Dürer created his woodcut in 1498, two years before the world was expected to end. But even if 1500 failed to bring the Last Judgement, as the 16th century dawned, there were many signs to indicate that the end approached.

Let us take them in reverse order. The pale horse was disease; it was dysentery, typhus, smallpox, malaria, and typhoid fever. It was also bubonic plague that continued to reappear on average every 16 years, with a lethality rate of between 60% and 80%. It killed quickly and horribly. “Plague has no tomorrows,” wrote Guillaume Potel in 1623.

But these epidemics — though deadly and greatly feared — were known enemies. What was startling was, like Covid, the manifestation of awful new diseases. Two appeared at the end of the 15th century. The sweating sickness, which broke out for the first time among Henry Tudor’s troops before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, produced a fever and pain all over the body, accompanied by thick, vile-smelling sweat and delirium, and all that within the space of a day. Its lethality rate was high, and it recurred repeatedly over the subsequent 60 years, before vanishing as quickly as it had come. We still don’t know what it was.

The second new disease arrived and stayed. It was the pox, which came to be known by the Latinate name of syphilis. Again, it emerged among armies — those of the French during the First Italian War of the 1490s — and it produced great agonies through deep, rotting sores all over the body. It was incurable and terrifying, and quickly associated with sexual sin. The long-term effects were lesions, ulcers, paralysis, blindness, dementia and disfigurement. In comparison with the sweat and the pox, Covid is a walk in the park — but we should fear what comes next. In December 2019, Professor Peter Frankopan wrote presciently that the biggest threat to the world in the 2020s would be a pandemic. Let’s hope it’s the one we’ve already had.

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The black horse was dearth. In the 16th century, there were some awful famines, resulting from harvest failure and bad weather. Contemporaries blamed man’s gluttony: “if we in eating and drinking exceed when God of his large liberality sendeth plenty, he will soon change plenty in[to] scarceness,” wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in 1563, while John Downame in 1613 similarly concluded that drunkards and gluttons were at fault “because in time of plenty, they take too much and so abuse his creatures”, so “he bringeth upon them in the time of dearth and famine a proportionable punishment.”

Much famine, then as now, was man-made, like the eight-month siege of Sancerre in 1573 during the French Wars of Religion. The inhabitants first turned to eating their horses and donkeys, then cats, rats, and finally dogs. Six months in, people tried eating leather. When that was gone, they soaked, chopped, and boiled their books up with herbs and spices. After paper, they ate the hooves of cattle, and then they collected human excrement to eat. One family ate the ears, tongue, head, brains and entrails of their three-year-old daughter after she had died from hunger.

What is the equivalent in our own age? From 2019 to 2020, in part because of the pandemic, the number of undernourished people increased by 161 million, on a planet that produces more than enough food to feed everyone. In the rich West, we probably won’t die of hunger — but we may die of gluttony. The British poor, who can more easily afford processed foods than fresh produce, suffer from among the worst rates of obesity globally. And our metaphorical gluttony — for energy and convenience — prevents our action against climate change. A cataclysmic weather event or natural disaster threatens apocalypse for us as much as it did our ancestors; what distinguishes us is that they feared what they could not control, while we know what to do about it but don’t seem to fear enough to do it.

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The red horse was war. The 16th century witnessed fewer than 10 years of complete peace. It was an age in which battles moved from being fought by sword, lance and halberd to cannon, arquebus and musket. In 1545, Ambroise Paré published the first book to deal with treatments for gunshot wounds and battlefield amputations. Armies grew dramatically in size and their provisioning devastated the lands through which they marched.

Warfare is less obvious today. Troops do not get billeted to our homes, nor loot and pillage our food supplies. But world peace is something that remains elusive. Judged by societal safety and security, ongoing domestic and international conflict, and levels of militarisation, the world feels like it’s getting steadily less peaceful. We no longer fear the H-bomb, nor do we expect warfare to bring about the imminent end of the world, but maybe we should.

The conquering white horse will perhaps seem most distant. It came to be associated — not as we might suspect with the European invaders of Latin America — but with revelation. People living in 1500 believed that the ultimate cause of the world’s annihilation would be God delivering on his promise of a Second Coming of Christ and a Day of Judgement (something conventionally not feared by the poor but looked forward to as a time of reckoning for those who had wronged them). Martin Luther styled himself as Elijah, a prophet sent to expose the Pope as the Antichrist and to herald the Second Coming. Protestant images, such as Lucas Cranach’s The Origins of the Antichrist, show the Pope to be a grotesque female, with enlarged labia, and being breathed into by two devils. More demons pound monks in a winepress, extracting from them the juice of damnation.

But Catholics, too, were infused by a sense of millenarian thinking. Professor Denis Crouzet’s book Guerriers de Dieu argued that French Catholics saw the Protestant heretics as the harbingers of the Last Days. Catholic preachers ascribed the pestilence and famines of the century to divine wrath that had been provoked by the Protestant apostasy. Catholics engaged in a mighty struggle with the forces of darkness when they slew their Huguenot neighbours; they were the “warriors of God” of his title.

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The imminence of the end of days was confirmed by the stars, as Jesus promised in the Gospels. Great comets in 1577, 1596, 1607 and 1618 caused much fearful commentary, while astronomer Tycho Brahe, writing about the new star discovered in 1572, wrote that it has been “now finally shown to the world while it is approaching its evening”. Floods, storms, and avalanches too were all thought to foretell the approaching end of time, as observers sought out auguries of when that end might come with fear and fascination.

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse had one shared aim: they mowed down sinners. We may not use the word “sin” much, but we cannot deny that the pandemics, famine, war and so-called “acts of God” of our own time are, in large part, ultimately caused by humankind’s own avarice and selfishness.

Perhaps, in the end, it is that which may bring an end to human time itself. Perhaps we should pay more heed to the auguries of our own times: the wet markets of Wuhan, or the news that Canada registered a record, Sahara-desert like high of 49.6°C last month, that UN officials have warned that 400,000 people in Tigray, Ethiopia are now in famine… The Four Horsemen are on the horizon once again.

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

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Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

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Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

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This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

She was probably thinking of the recent past — the few centuries in which meteorological records have been kept. Figuring out past weather before that takes an ingenious combination of history, archaeology and science: eye-witness accounts and fluctuating grain prices are married with data from ice cores, grape-harvest dates and tree-ring sequences. But that tricky evidence indicates past climatic extremes that could provide “predictive points of reference for adaptation and loss reduction,” as Oliver Wetter, Jean-Laurent Spring et al argued in the science journal Climatic Change in 2014 (in a nice case of nominative determinism).

This evidence points to a Little Ice Age from around 1560. Winters were severe. Pieter Bruegel painted his hunters, their heads bent against the cold, trudging through deep snow towards villagers skating on a frozen river. But the Little Ice Age wasn’t just a deep freeze. It was also a “climatic seesaw”, writes Brian Fagan, of “arctic winters, blazing summers, serious droughts, torrential rain”. A winter storm in summer and a tropical hurricane at an unusual high latitude thrashed the Spanish Armada of 1588 far more roundly than the English warships.

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One great drought predates the start of the Little Ice Age by 20 years. In February 1540 rainfall effectively ceased, falling only six times in London between then and September. It was not only exceptionally dry but warm: it is probable that the highest daily temperatures were warmer than 2003 (the warmest year for centuries). Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle notes,

“This year was a hot summer and dry, so that no rain fell from June till eight days after Michaelmas [29 September], so that in divers parts of this realm the people carried their cattle six or seven miles to water them, and also much cattle died; and also there reigned strange sickness among the people in this realm, as laskes [dysentery] and hot agues, and also pestilence, whereof many people died…”

Edward Hall noted that the drought dried up wells and small rivers, while the Thames was so shallow that “saltwater flowed above London Bridge”, polluting the water supply and contributing to the dysentery and cholera, which killed people in their thousands. In Rome, no rain fell in nine months; in Paris, the Seine ran dry. Grapes withered on the vine and fruit rotted on trees. Even the small respite of autumn and winter was followed by a second warm spring and another blisteringly hot summer. Forests began to die until, in late 1541, rain fell and fell. 1542 was a year of widespread flooding.

It is reductive to argue a simple causative relationship between the climate and historical events, but it is equally false to suggest the weather had no effect at all. Excessive heat only needed to affect the judgement of one man, Henry VIII, to create deaths. In July 1540 the visiting French ambassador described as the “extraordinary sight” of three Catholics being hanged for treason and three Protestants burnt for heresy in Smithfield in London on the same day. A week later — Henry’s right-hand-man, Cromwell, being beheaded on the day that the aging king married a teenager. Maybe the king’s famous temper was worse when he had a sweat on him.

The effects of the great drought were less far-reaching, however, than the devastating conditions of the 1590s. Rain fell across Europe for the best part of four years, while mean winter temperatures dropped two degrees. Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describes it thus:

“…the winds, piping to us to vain,
As in revenge have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard.”

Freezing rain meant the harvests of 1593, 1594, 1596 and 1597 failed. It’s hard to grasp what this meant in an age of subsistence farming; we can know there were no supermarkets and still fail to comprehend what it must have been like to live without any cushion against starvation. One harvest failure meant hunger; two in a row, dearth; a run of bad harvests, famine. Fear gripped as tightly as cold. Epidemics followed in famine’s wake. Prices rose to 40-year highs and, as Bob Marley sang, “A hungry mob is an angry mob.”

People rose up and authorities clamped down. On 13 June 1595, a crowd of three hundred apprentices protested the price of butter in Southwark market by seizing control and forcing vendors to sale at the old, lower price of 3d. a pound. A fortnight later, some of these apprentices were publicly whipped and set on the pillory, which itself instigated a riot. A thousand-strong crowd marched on Tower Hill, planning to “steal, pill[age] and spoil the wealthy … and take the sword of authority from the magistrates and governors.”

Food scarcity had quickly morphed into class hatred. Five of the apprentices were hanged for treason. Over the next year, there were attempted risings in Oxfordshire, Devon and elsewhere, while a Somerset JP observed to Lord Burghley that inequalities were worsening: “the rich men have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor.”

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Years of hardship make some people richer and some people poorer or, more exactly, they make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Plus ça change. In the coronavirus pandemic, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Zoom founder Eric Yuan have increased their already gargantuan fortunes by several billions of dollars. In the UK, all that was required to make a profit out of other people’s pain was, apparently, to be chums with a Conservative. (The New York Times found in December that some $11 billion of UK central government contracts went to companies run by associates of the Tories, or with no prior experience or a history of fraud, corruption or other controversy. And that’s just the data that has been published.)

History has more to tell us on this. It was so cold in the terrible winter of 1607-8 that the trunks of large trees split open, and the Thames froze so solidly that people sold beer and played football on it: the first Frost Fair. The “Great Frost”, as an anonymous writer – maybe Thomas Dekker — called it in 1608, made the Thames “bankrupt”. London was cut off from commerce that relied on the river. Furloughed Londoners called it “the dead vacation”, for, Dekker wrote, “if it be a gentleman’s life to live idly and do nothing, how many poor artificers [artisans] and tradesmen have been made gentlemen then by this frost?”

Merchants could not ship goods, and neither wood nor coal could reach London. The price of fuel rose without mercy. Things were hardly better in the country: “the poor ploughman’s children sit crying and blowing their nails”, while “the ox stands bellowing, the ragged sheep bleating, the poor lamb shivering and starving to death.”

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These recurrent moments of climatic crisis did not just leave people cold and hungry. Many poorer families went continually into debt, forcing all members to work as many jobs as possible in the “economy of makeshifts”. Neighbourly relations were tested by the moral customs of hospitality and charity and the necessity of thrift and self-preservation. The witchcraft craze of the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, in which perhaps 45,000 died, was exacerbated by deep insecurity and resentment. Hunger, envy and anger created the mental space in which witchcraft accusations occurred.

The trigger for accusing a neighbour of witchcraft was often linked in some way to food and fertility — the death of the cow or the sale of a pig — some vital livestock that meant the difference between having enough and not. The institutional response to poverty was to introduce relief for the poor, but with moral judgements attached. The pernicious conceptual divide between the deserving and undeserving poor — those unable to work and those thought unwilling to work — remains with us. It was thought that beggars and vagabonds chose to be unemployed when in fact opportunities were contracting. The Vagrancy Act of 1597 ordered the punishment of “all wandering persons… able in body, loitering and refusing to work” by flogging, branding, transportation overseas, or confinement to gaol-like houses of correction that prefigured later workhouses and modern prisons.

What can we learn from these grim years? Most obviously, the slowly unfolding disaster of global warming means extreme weather events will be more common. We might not starve from harvest failure, but excess rain can make raw sewage overflow into homes and roads collapse — like the spectacular Highway 1 in California. Electricity grids can be knocked out by frosts or heatwaves; deep droughts reduce water supplies. “Present bias” makes it hard for us, writes Henry Fountain, to make the lifestyle changes that could prevent or mitigate catastrophe down the road, but the past and the future are begging us to do so.

But these extreme events also speak much to us after a year of lockdown. The inequalities between rich and poor have become stark and, like the “prentices” in Southwark, those who can least afford it are the worst hit. Those who have been made redundant or whose hours have been cut or who don’t know if they’ll have a job after Covid endure the gnawing anxiety, shame, and misery that money worries bring. But the deep insecurity created by furlough, job losses and ravaged self-employment is also emerging in other ways.

This has been a year of stresses and distresses which, coupled with the sheer insularity of lockdown, has exacerbated tensions between groups, producing a sense of feeling aggrieved and that certain disputes are irreconcilable. We are all under strain; trust is eroded. We look to provide for ourselves; we are quick to judge others. We may not accuse our neighbours of witchcraft, but we have our modern equivalents. If there is a cultural war, the deprivations of 2020-21 will have aggravated antagonisms. Even familiar bonds have been challenged by obedience (and disobedience) to lockdown rules.

Our forebears were inventive. They found new ways to survive in the face of unpredictable weather: they adopted new foods, like root vegetables and pulses, planted new crops, and used new methods for farming and preserving. In Austria, the cold gave the wine such low sugar content that much of the population switched to beer drinking. But, as the author of The Great Frost noted, “these extraordinary fevers have always other evils attending upon them”. We must be scholars of time and harken to the lessons she would teach us.

To understand this, we need to consider Henry IX’s formation. Just 18 months after his parents’ glittering joint coronation at Westminster Abbey, Prince Henry was born on New Year’s Day 1511 to Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.

The romance between Henry and Katherine is one of the great love stories of history, so it is easily forgotten that she had previously been married to Henry’s brother, Arthur: at their wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1501, the young Henry had walked Katherine down the aisle, and it is probably at that point that he conceived his desire for her.

She was his first love and marrying her was one of the first acts of his new reign. Until her death in 1536, he demonstrated his utter devotion to her by inscribing their intertwined initials on his armour, featuring her badge — the pomegranate — alongside his rose throughout his palaces, and even defying convention by wearing her favours in the lists.

The couple shared a love of music, dancing, entertainments and magnificence. Henry liked to hunt, Katherine to hawk; both rode fearlessly. They had both been highly educated and could converse in Latin and French as well as English, as some rueful ambassadors discovered. Their shared love of learning and patronage, and their mutual taste in devotional and theological works, explains many of the riches of the Royal Collection today.

In 1524 Venetian Marino Sanuto observed that Henry and Katherine were two separate bodies animated by one spirit and one mind. Theirs was almost a joint rulership: Henry trusted Katherine and was advised by her. Katherine’s parents, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, had adopted the motto tanto monta — each as important as the other — and it could equally have been applied to Henry and Katherine.

The history of the enduring affection and friendship between England and Spain can be traced to their marriage, as can England’s continuing Hispanophilia. Katherine was so revered by the women of the court that they adopted the Spanish style of dress: fitted bodices, wide sleeves, full skirts over farthingales, high-heeled clogs and the veil or mantilla, dispensing with the unattractive gable hoods that predated her.

Their union was consolidated by the arrival of their son and heir, and to mark the birth, guns rang out from the Tower, bells pealed, bonfires were lit in the streets of London, and wine flowed freely. After Prince Henry’s christening, his father rode to Walsingham to give thanks to Our Lady and held a great tournament at Westminster to celebrate, jousting astride a charger splendidly trapped in a caparison decorated with the initials “H” and “K”.

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As the young prince grew into a sturdy boy, universally praised by foreign visitors to the court for his beauty, wit and strength, Katherine endured a further four pregnancies, but of them, only a daughter, Mary, would survive. We know her as Mary of England, Holy Roman Empress, beloved wife of Charles V, after their marriage in 1530.

But Prince Henry also had at least two half-siblings, since the king’s love for Katherine did not preclude the taking of mistresses: the beautiful Elizabeth Blount bore the king a son in 1519. The brothers were close, and Prince Henry suffered great grief when the younger boy died in 1536. Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn — former lady-in-waiting to the queen, wife of James Butler, 9^th Earl of Ormond, and the king’s mistress from 1527 — gave birth to a girl, Elizabeth, in 1533. Some historians have posited that the red-haired Lady Elizabeth Butler was the king’s daughter, but we will never know for certain. After Katherine of Aragon’s death in 1536, Henry VIII’s new wife Jane bore him a further son, Prince Edward, a year later.

Katherine’s influence can perhaps most be seen on Henry VIII’s religiosity. It was inspired by and to impress her that Henry wrote his book, Disputation on the Sacraments, refuting Luther and earning his title “Defender of the Faith”. Under the influence of Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII also presided over the burnings of heretics in the 1530s and 1540s, including sacramentarian John Lambert and a married cleric called Thomas Cranmer.

On the same day as Henry VIII married for the third time to the young Catherine Howard (a marriage that would later be annulled by the pope when Catherine was discovered to have been pre-contracted in marriage), Henry had renowned heretic and former servant to Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, burnt at Smithfield. Recent research has suggested, however, that Henry’s fourth and final wife, Kateryn Parr, may have been a Lutheran. She successfully hid her heresy from the king, but her influence on the young Prince Edward was strong. By his early teens, he showed dangerous signs of Lutheran leanings.

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In 1539, Prince Henry married Anne, a young duchess from Cleves who was just four years his junior. Their betrothal portraits by Hans Holbein show Anne’s attractive face, dark brown eyes under long lashes, and alluring half-smile, and Prince Henry, then in his late 20s. He is auburn-haired like his parents, with pale skin, a round face, blue eyes and a long nose reminiscent of his maternal grandmother, Isabel of Castile.

When Henry VIII died in January 1547, the prince acceded to the throne as King Henry IX at the age of 35. Tall, winsome and popular, he and his much-loved Queen were already parents to four daughters: Isabella — named for both her great-grandmothers — Maria, Sybille and Katherine. Henry IX was therefore the first adult married king with heirs to inherit the throne since Henry V, demonstrating the success of the Tudor succession.

Prince Edward remained Henry’s heir presumptive until his death in 1553 (their siister Mary died in 1558), but Henry and Anne had prepared for any eventuality and, inspired by the long traditions of female rule in both their families, they raised their daughters to be queens. The girls were polyglots, educated in Latin, Greek, French, German and Spanish; they were exposed early to the strategies and realities of rule.

Following the observance of the Trastámara family of his mother and the example of his father, Henry IX was a devoutly Catholic king. His piety can be traced from his youth: the Library of England has an autographed copy of a prayer in an illustrated devotional Book of Hours, inscribed in a childish hand “The prayer of Sainte Thomas of Aquine translated out of Latine into Englyshe by ye most exselent Prince Henry son to the most high and mighty Prynce and Prynces Kyng Henry the VIII and Quene Kateryne hys wyfe”. Both Henry and Anne had been raised as Erasmian Catholics, while Henry received a humanist education at his mother’s hands.

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As a result, he came to be one of Europe’s great reforming Catholic monarchs. Many of the abuses of the late medieval Church, such as simony and pluralism, were tackled by the king’s Court of Reformation. Decrees were issued on clerical morals, seminaries were established and doctrinal statements reaffirmed the importance of the Mass, pilgrimages and the veneration of saints and relics. The reform of the monasteries in the 1550s explains why the monastic tradition in England remains so rich today, and why our great medieval libraries, such as that at Glastonbury, continue to attract scholars from around the world.

Unlike his parents, however, Henry IX immediately ended the execution of heretics, and sponsored the translation of the Bible into English – the King Henry Bible. And it was this, and the extent of his reforms, that led to the clash with Rome. Urging further reform and tolerance on the Vatican, Henry IX ran into opposition from the austere, anti-Semitic Pope Paul IV, who was a bitter enemy of Catholic humanism. The English king was publicly accused of harbouring heretics and was privately suspected to be a hidden Lutheran. Establishing himself as Supreme Governor of the Church in England in 1558 was the only way for Henry IX to protect the advances that had been made. This was a fundamental step in the shaping of English national identity as a land of liberal, tolerant and catholic — but not Roman Catholic — believers.

So it was that a most Catholic king, from most Catholic parents, came to break with Rome. When Henry died 30 years later, aged 77, and was succeeded by his daughter, Queen Isabella I — England’s first queen regnant — she could unproblematically adopt the iconography of the Virgin Mary, while reigning as Supreme Governor of the Church.

Historical note: On 22 February 1511, Prince Henry, the firstborn son of King Henry VIII and Queen Katherine of Aragon, died at the age of seven weeks.

It’s not quite clear why Anne has often been misremembered as a self-made woman of humble birth. Perhaps it’s the appeal of a rags-to-riches story. Or perhaps the gravity-defying rise of low-born men like Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell has been silently projected onto Anne. From modest and mean origins to monarchy itself, Anne becomes a Tudor Cinderella (albeit with a far from fairy-tale end).

So we’re told that her paternal great-grandfather was a cloth-merchant — which is accurate, in much the same way that it is accurate to describe Sir James Dyson as a man who sells vacuum cleaners. Geoffrey Boleyn, too, had a knighthood to match.

Anne’s father, Thomas, was of sufficient gentry status to marry Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, later second Duke of Norfolk and Elizabeth Tilney, former lady-in-waiting to Queens Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth of York (this was not an imaginative period for naming).

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Thomas Boleyn was himself made a Knight of the Garter in 1523 — before Anne caught Henry VIII’s eye — for his own service to the king as his “squire of the body”, as an ambassador to the French court, and as a member of the king’s council. Anne had privilege.

Then there’s the idea that Anne was young and beautiful — for surely she must have been to attract a king.

We don’t know exactly when Anne was born. It wasn’t until 1538 that it became obligatory to keep the sort of parish records of baptisms, marriages and funerals that would give approximate dates of births for all, including the girls.

But even by the late 16th century, the antiquarian William Camden recorded that Anne had been born in 1507 — making her 19 when Henry noticed her, 26 when he married her, and not yet 30 when she died. Remember Catherine Howard’s youth (and overlook Katherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr) and you can start to create a narrative of Henry liking his women green. The 1507 date also fits with the origin-myth favoured by the country’s foremost Anne Boleyn tourist attraction, Hever Castle, for it means that she was born there.

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But there is independent evidence that makes an alternate date — 1501 — seem much more convincing. An autographed letter survives from Anne to her father, sent from the court of Archduchess Margaret of Austria, while at Tervuren in modern-day Belgium in 1513 or 1514. The orthography (for which she begs excuse) is unorthodox, but everyone’s was in the 16th century. The elegant secretary hand, however, is manifestly not that of even a careful six- or seven-year-old: here is the writing of a young woman, on the cusp of teenagehood.

Which means that the relationship between Anne and Henry began when she was 26 (relatively old for a woman of her status to be single in the 16th century), they married when she was 33, and she died at 36.

Nor did Henry fall wildly in love with the beautiful Anne Boleyn at first sight. Though our first record of her at the English court is in March 1522, the king’s interest in her can be dated to around 1526. And the four-year delay was only in part because his dance card was already full (when he rode out to joust in 1522 bearing the motto, elle mon cœur a navera — “she has wounded my heart” — he may have had a Boleyn girl in mind but, famously, the other one, Anne’s sister, Mary). The other reason he took a while to notice her is that Anne was not a conventionally good-looking woman.

We only really know this from the documentary evidence. Despite the familiarity of various reproductions of a portrait of Anne wearing a round pearl-trimmed hood, black and sable gown, and the now-famous ‘B’ pendant, none of them can be dated with any certainty to her lifetime. Our best guess is that they are copies of a lost original painted from the life, and their production during the reign of her daughter, some 50 or 60 years after Anne’s death, may explain why some seem to have been prettified.

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The Venetian diplomat Francesco Sanuto described Anne as “not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised”. Anne’s dark hair was unfashionable, although even Sanuto also noted Anne’s dark and sparkling eyes.

This does not mean we should believe, however, the propaganda of Nicholas Sander, a Jesuit writing under Elizabeth I, from whom we get the following report of Anne: black hair, sallow skin as if “troubled with jaundice”, six fingers on her right hand, a projecting tooth, and a large wen — a boil or cyst — under her chin. There is no evidence contemporary to Anne’s life to support anything he says except the colour of her hair and her tanned skin.

Finally, there’s the fable that Anne Boleyn was executed on charges of witchcraft, as well as incest and adultery.

In her trial indictment, Anne was certainly charged, and later found guilty, of incest (with her brother), adultery (with five men including her brother), and conspiring the king’s death. The latter charge was crucial, as it was the only one carrying the death penalty, under the 1534 Treasons Act by which it was treason to imagine the death of the king in words. But of witchcraft there is no sign.

The source for this misremembrance comes, I think, from the 19th-century translation of a letter from Eustace Chapuys, the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to the English court, to the Emperor Charles V, in which he reported an, at least, fourth-hand account that Henry had told “someone” that he had married Anne “seduced by witchcraft”.

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There’s no corroborating evidence that Henry ever said anything of the sort, and even Chapuys’s original letter uses the word sortilèges, which could mean sorcery — but could also carry the sense of having been “bewitched” by someone — no literal magic necessary.

The American historian Retha Warnicke further stirred the cauldron by suggesting that Anne had given birth in 1536 to a “deformed foetus” — her take on an account by Sander (again) that Anne had miscarried “a shapeless mass of flesh”. Warnicke argued that 16th-century observers would have concluded from this that Anne was a witch.

Anne miscarried at three-and-a-half months, so the foetus was hardly likely to have looked much like a full-term baby, and our source was once again writing at the remove of half a century — but, more pertinently, the appearance of a miscarried baby has never been cited in any early modern witchcraft trial I’ve ever heard of. It’s a sexy theory — and pure bunkum.

The truth is all far more mundane. Anne was a high-born woman, whose family pedigree brought her into Henry’s circle. It was her conversational wit and elegant cosmopolitanism that attracted Henry, not any great youth or beauty or magical ability. The privilege of her birth aside, she was an everywoman and we prefer the heroines of history to be something more than ordinary.

Suzannah Lipscomb’s latest book, The Voice of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc, is available from Oxford University Press.