EXPERT BIO
MALCOLM GASKILL
Malcolm Gaskill is emeritus professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He has written extensively on witchcraft beliefs, most recently in the Wolfston History Prize nominated book The Ruin of All Witches.
Headshot courtesy of the Wolfon Foundation
The belief in witchcraft and magic seems to have always cast a spell on the popular imagination. The image of the greenfaced, pointy-hatted witch who cackles maniacally as she rides a broomstick across a starry night sky has adorned Halloween cards and the pages of fairy tale books for decades. Yet witchcraft itself has a long and convoluted history, the word often changing in meaning and certainly in the seriousness with which it is treated. From the 16th to the 18th century, hoards of women were placed on trial, tortured and murdered under the charge of ‘witchcraft’. In the 20th and 21st centuries it has become a subject for fantasy and fiction, with tales of bespectacled boy wizards and teenage witches with talking cats. But where does belief in witchcraft come from and how has it changed over the centuries?
“It’s an incredibly ancient belief, actually, ” says Malcolm Gaskill, author of nominated for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. “In the classical world, they believe in witches (though they don’t always call them that) but there is the essential idea that there are demons out there in the universe and that they can be manipulated for good or for evil.” –“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” – would be used in later centuries to justify the persecution of people suspected of witchcraft. The phrase was even included on the front page of the notorious Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins’ 1647 work
