witches
Showing posts with label witches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label witches. Show all posts

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick: Manuscripts, Magical and Remarkable

As its Halloween, it is almost obligatory that I should write about things that go bump in the night. This year, I’ve been enjoying my spooky fix via Sky’s Discovery of Witches – a TV series featuring witches, vampires and demons, based on the All Souls trilogy of books by Deborah Harkness. I first read – and greatly enjoyed - the books some years ago, and have to admit to rather mixed feelings about the TV series. The actors are generally great (although personally I’m not sure about all the casting choices!) and the cinematography and locations are beautiful. But, as is inevitable with any adaptation, they’ve had to leave things out, or at least not give them the prominence they receive in the novels.

In Harkness’ books, the Twilight-style romance is leavened with a real passion for history. The protagonist Diana has a non-magical career an academic historian, and her love for the subject – or rather, that of Harkness (herself a professional historian before she turned to novel-writing) really shines through. In particular, significant time and space within the novels is devoted to loving, meticulous descriptions of the illuminated manuscripts Diana studies (and which cause her such supernatural trouble – her discovery of a bewitched book kicks off the plot).

The only other place where I’ve read such bewitching (excuse the pun) yet accurate descriptions of medieval manuscripts is in Christopher de Hamel’s wonderful Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (if you’ve not yet read it, it is worth getting your hands on the hardback version for the beauty and quality of the reproductions.) Taking one manuscript per century between the C6th and C16th, de Hamel walks his readers through what it is like to see, feel, touch and smell the reality of these rare and precious objects, as well as explaining the historical and social conditions in which they were created. It is accessible, scholarly and passionate; beautiful and illuminating all at once, as perfect and jewelled as the manuscripts he describes. 

So, my item for the Cabinet of Curiosities this month? Definitely a medieval manuscript. But I’m torn. My personal favourite from de Hamel’s book is the fourteenth century Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, with its stunning and intricate gothic illuminations. But I do wonder if I might be allowed Diana’s fictional, magical Book of Life, explaining through alchemical imagery the origins and destinies of vampires, witches, demons and humans?

Well, it is Halloween, when the veil between the mundane and the magical is supposedly at its thinnest, so maybe, just maybe…

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Voices Unearthed: Diane Purkiss's 'English Civil War.' Leslie Wilson



  In my childhood, I went to historical novels if I wanted to find out about the lives of ordinary people: even Trevelyan's 'Social History of England,' which my father gave me when I was a young teenager, was rather too general in its narrative. I always wanted to get an idea of what life was like for ordinary people, not just for the generals, the nobles, or the King. Above all, I was interested in the lives of women. When I first started to write historical fiction, very few historians seemed interested in women's lives; they were peripheral to the main action.When I started to write about Nazi Germany, I did begin to get access to these, through diaries and journals and also covert reports from Social Democrats on life inside the Third Reich. But the lives of women in earlier times, when women were largely illiterate, were much harder to come at (though Alice Clark's The Working Life of Seventeenth Century Women was an invaluable resource.)

But here is a work of history, written by a distinguished scholar, as fascinating as any novel. Of late years, I've noticed that historians are beginning to go through 'unimportant' bits of detail, diaries, account books, wills, to resurrect the lives of women, and though there is still much we cannot get at, we are getting enough to give us a much better idea than we previously had. Diane Purkiss is writing in this tradition; though The English Civil War does also give us the voices of men, and she tells the stories of the King and Cromwell, Henrietta Maria and women of the aristocracy.

But in this book you also can hear  the common soldier , and ordinary, lower middle-class women whose voices were recorded because they became preachers in some of the Independent sects that grew during the ferment of this period, as well as those of the gentry are also heard. The book opens up the experience of a broad section of English society during the conflict.

As well as giving voice to the ordinary people (and examining the role starvation, which was widespread as the war dragged on, played in people's actions and reactions,) this book gives an in-depth, considered analysis of the causes and drivers of the conflict. Too many authors, for example, have described the religious issues of the times in the convenient portmanteau phrase: 'the Royalists were Anglicans, the Parliamentarians were Puritans'. In fact, many of the Parliamentarians were Anglicans, and Anglicanism in those days meant Calvinism, a theology nowadays more likely to be associated with Presbyterianism. The distinction between those who believed some humans were predestined for damnation, some for salvation, was far more complex than the Cavalier/Roundhead divide. This is important, because religion was a crucial part of people's lives in those days and needs to be understood.

Diane Purkiss also shows us the hideous anti-Catholic prejudice which meant many Catholics had their houses destroyed, were abused, attacked, and murdered. It was an atmosphere which reminded me of present-day Islamophobia, and gave an uneasy flavour of what might happen if it is nurtured, as it is at present. The mutilation of the Royalist camp followers after Naseby, who were considered to be whores and Irish Catholics (many of them were Anglican soldiers' wives), was what we would nowadays see as a horrific war crime. In addition, she tells the story of Matthew Hopkins's notorious Essex witchhunt, and makes a convincing case for the war's agency in the outbreak of a kind of witch prosecution otherwise absent from England.

What comes across, crucially, in this history, is that the protagonists of the Civil War didn't behave the way we would like them to; they were people of their own time. It's far too common for even historians to be partisan in writing about the conflict (and most of them taking the 'Cavalier' side). But what matters in the end is not who won, who had flowing locks and was romantic, who were people we'd like to identify with (none of them, once you really look at it). These people had ideas, many of which filled the ruling establishment with horror, which we would now view as mainstream or even old-fashioned, since few even of the Levellers and Ranters wanted women to have the vote. Indeed, some Ranters thought women had no souls (one was set to rights by George Fox, one of the first Quakers, an organisation that did give women the right to speak and continued that after the ferment of the wartime period had died down). But they had those ideas, and that was important. Yes, works of art were destroyed and images in churches were destroyed, but that was also part of their passionate belief in a religion that didn't rely on outward show.

As a Quaker, I can comprehend that, since I worship in a plain, unadorned room, mostly in silence, and the price of that precious worship was partly the destruction of statues in our cathedrals. Diane Purkiss says at the end of the book that she wouldn't exchange Milton's 'Paradise Lost' for the Rubens crucifixion that was destroyed during the war. 'Sometimes destruction is the price we pay for artistic breakthrough.' And spiritual, and political.

There is not enough written about the English Civil War. If you want to start reading about it, or want to revisit the period, this is the book to get going on. I wasn't able to put it down.




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