Name: Marion Gibson WITCHLAND
Start: 2026-08-22T15:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-08-22T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Blackwell's Bookshop

If the witchfinders came to your town, who would you have believed - and what would you have done?
About this Event

Witchland

With the English civil wars raging in the background, Witchland reveals how economic uncertainty, religious extremism and deprivation created the ideal conditions for mass witch-hunting in Britain. Across the country, fear spread rapidly, and neighbours turned on one another in panic. Women and the poor were especially vulnerable, scapegoated by the powerful looking for someone to blame, and hundreds of witch trials across the country soon followed. The hysteria provided a handbook for similar trials to occur around the world, most famously just a few decades later in Salem.

Moving from village to village, Professor Marion Gibson reveals how accusations grew out of everyday tensions - poverty, grief, and resentment - and how entire communities became involved in the persecution of the innocent. Drawing on newly uncovered historical records, this gripping historical account restores the voices of those accused of witchcraft. These were ordinary people, largely forgotten by history, along with their families and neighbours caught up in suspicion and moral panic.

Marion Gibson

Marion Gibson writes about witches and magic in history. She’s been interested in witches for over thirty years, since she read the words of women accused of witchcraft in Elizabethan England. Why were they accused of crimes they didn’t commit? And why did they confess?

Marion’s books tell the stories of these women and the men accused alongside them, and she explores the wider history of witch trials, folklore, magical and pagan beliefs and things that go bump in the night. She’s a Professor and teaches at Exeter University in south west England where her students read everything from medieval witch-hunting manuals to Gothic novels, and trial records to Harry Potter.

Marion’s book Witchcraft tells the stories of thirteen important witch trials around the world from the fifteenth century to the present day. She’s seldom happier than when she’s peering at worm-eaten parchments, wandering around old towns with her partner and dog, and imagining herself and her readers back into the past. She also has a three-legged cat, but it’s definitely not a familiar.

Her latest book Witchland is the captivating story of witchcraft, inequality and the violence that surfaces during times of political and economic upheaval.