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It is brilliant to welcome everyone to the third day of the magic and the sense of place conference.

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So Alice Huxley is a doctoral student in her third year at Oxford University at Saint John's College,

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researching the relationship between folklore and literature and place across the 18th and 19th centuries.

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And she's going to be talking to us about 18th century fairies in Kensington Gardens before Barry.

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So I hand over now to the first panellist Alice Huxley.

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Thank you very much for being here. If you walk around the recreational life in Kensington Garden, a public park in London,

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you'll come across this statue of the boy who wouldn't grow up.

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J.M. Barrie, the inventor of Peter Pan, commissioned the statue himself,

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arranging for workmen to install it behind awning so that when the awning was taken down, Peter Pan would appear as if by magic.

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Today, if people associate Kensington Gardens with fairies, it is likely because of the Peter Pan.

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But Barrie himself lived in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens and took regular walk through the park with his enormous Saint Bernard.

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His first Peter Pan book describes the fairies and other magical creatures who come out to play in Kensington Gardens.

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After the gates and locks, even in the late to Peter Pan novel set predominantly in the Neverland,

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Peter Pan tells the Darling Children that he once ran away to Kensington Gardens to live among the fairies.

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Barry's fame, both during and after his lifetime, has included earlier works of Barry literature sat in Kensington Gardens.

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In fact, the site's association with Barry's precedes the invention of Peter Pan by almost two centuries.

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This paper situates Barry is the inheritor, not the inventor of the pre-existing mythology of the place.

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By turning to the first known depiction of Kensington Fairies.

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A 1721 poem by Thomas to Carl. Takata was a member of the wicked intellectual circle surrounding Joseph Addison,

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a group of writers who enjoyed commercial and critical success in their own time but were afterwards relegated to the status of minor poets.

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A number of recent scholars, including Abigail Williams, have called for a reassessment of literary output.

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Kensington Garden is one such poem which warrants renewed critical attention.

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The poem is a mock heroic narrative poem which takes a conventional premise for

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an essay to provide an origin story for a culturally important place or people,

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and parodies that convention. By providing an origin story for a limited patch of garden to Kells,

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Poem describes the romantic and political conflicts that caused the downfall of the very court which supposedly once existed on the site.

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To give you a brief overview of the plot, the immortal Fairy Princess Ken falls in love with Albion, who,

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while boasting impressive ancestors, including Neptune, is still mortal, born to a human mother and stolen by the fairies as an infant.

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When Kenneth's father, King Oberon, discovers their relationship, he banishes Albion and marries Kenneth with Barry instead.

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Albion wages war on Oberon, but dies in the ensuing conflict,

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prompting Neptune to avenge his death by destroying Oberon Bronze to see the end of the poem then jumps forward the early 18th century,

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when McKenna, who has already given her name to Kensington, inspires the royal gardener, Henry Wise, to construct the sunken terrace.

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Wise unconsciously recreates the layout of the fallen fairy city in the design of the garden.

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Why fairies and why heroic? So first, Barry.

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It is unlikely that Michael was basing his poem on a pre-existing folk tale about the fight, despite the claims of his narrator.

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Otherwise, for one thing, the sunken terrace had only existed for about 16 or 17 years by the time it to calibrate the poem.

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And for another, it was possible to boil complex about the very folk who might circulate stories about is it that seems

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reasonable to assume that tickle invented it's third tradition and I would suggest for a political

39
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purpose to tell it was drawing on a widespread association between royalty and fairies that spanned both

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oral and literary traditions that appeared in folktales about fairy kings and queens in the Inchon,

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tresses of Medieval Romance and an early modern text such as Edmund Spenser's, The Faerie Queene.

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Cycle adapted this fictional convention to flatter the hand of Barry Monarchy.

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He was at the heart of a Whig establishment that had been broadly supportive of George the first claim to the throne,

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and he had already written several poems championing the Canterbury schools by giving them the fairy treatment in Kensington Garden.

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He was thus situating them in a British landscape and cultural tradition at a time when their detractors view them as foreign interlopers.

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This poem about Kensington Garden seems to flatter one mysterious member of the board in particular.

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It opens not in the ancient days of the fairy city, but in the 18th century,

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presents with a description of the fashionable promenades that became a renowned feature of the garden during the period.

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Six lines are devoted to a complimentary portrayal of one parading noblewoman introduced as England's daughter darling of the land.

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So when I first set out to identify this anonymous figure, I had five main criteria based on a textual evidence of the poem.

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Firstly, and most obviously, the noblewoman must have participated in the following arts.

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Secondly, she must fit the description of England's metaphorical parents.

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Thirdly, she must be notably tall, as she's described, towering over her companions.

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Fourthly, there must be a plausible reason for this account.

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Writes about time in the political context of 1721.

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And finally, she should ideally have some relevance to the wider subject.

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The poem, though. Here are the most likely contenders from the Royal Court.

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George, the first daughter by his ex-wife, was Sophia Dorothea of Hanover.

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Sophia was notably told defending the third criteria, but she spent little time in England, let alone Kensington Palace.

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We can discounter quickly. The Victorian man of Letters, Leigh Hunt, instead took the poem as alluding to George,

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the first daughter in North Carolina, whom he credited with initiating the promenades.

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Caroline Beck will reach the first criteria and possibly also the fourth criteria,

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as she had recently brought about a reconciliation between George the first and George Augustus.

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On the other hand,

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the reconciliation had been transparently halfhearted and to Camus perhaps unlikely to write a flattering poem about Caroline in the 1720s.

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After five or six years of an uneasy relationship with the King George, the first was supposedly in the habit of calling her a devil, Madam Princess.

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We can also take George, the first other daughters, out of contention,

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even though they participated in the Kensington Promenades while George the first lived openly with his mistress.

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Now you've seen Wanda shooting in bed that children would not acknowledge as legitimate

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for fear of overstepping the amount of controversy which the public would tolerate.

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Instead, the three daughters were presented as Medici's nieces.

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So it's unlikely that two wrote about any one of them in particular.

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I would therefore like to put forward George the best distressed you seen as an alternative very thin anonymous noblewoman.

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This reading requires a different but textually supported interpretation of England's daughter as simply the country's darling.

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She undoubtedly fulfils the best criteria.

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She resided in Kensington Palace and participates in the promenades while she was so renowned for her extraordinary height.

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The nickname among the English population was the maypole.

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Melusine also meets the fourth criteria to count as a supporter of the Hanoverian

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monarchy and a compelling reason for betraying her in a flattering light.

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In the early 1720s, her public image was in dire need of repair.

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While some members of the English stated public as a terrorist,

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the de facto queen had detractors criticised her sharply in the press, a commentary often exacerbated by a combination of age,

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sexist and xenophobic prejudices not merely seen as old, unattractive and greedy as a parasite who'd come to drain the country's coffers.

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Some complained that she wielded too much power as an unofficial mediator between petitioners and the king,

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while others criticised her involvement in the South Sea Company, the collapse of which in 1720 caused a financial crash in Britain.

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To Kelly's poem that will be read as a protest of varying aspects to flexible access aspects of the public image debate.

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It provides a reputation while delicately minimising perceived power, presenting her outside in the gardens,

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participating in a frivolous promenade instead of manipulating the chains behind closed doors.

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She might explain the very subject of the poem.

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She shares the name with one of the aristocratic deluding fairies of European folklore and the medieval prose romance Melusine.

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The titular character is cast, transformed into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.

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She marries on the condition that her husband will never see her on a Saturday.

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But after years of marriage, he breaks his promise and his through the keyhole.

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While she bends the betrayed Melusine transforms into a dragon and flies away.

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This supernatural figure might seem like a strange namesake for members of the early modern nobility.

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However, Melusine is never just a monster. And the romance text.

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She is devoted, capable and inserted into real world genealogies.

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Is the founding matriarch of the house of Luce in a house that rules various principalities in Europe.

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And that happened during the late medieval period.

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George, the first mistress, was probably named Medici because the Monaco is associated with dynastic power as well as magic.

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In the poem, Teddy's undying devotion to Albion can be read as a sympathetic commentary on its relationship,

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both to George the First and to the nation at large. Albion is, of course, also an ancient name for Britain.

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There's a discrepancy between the back story and the reality of the garden early on in Kensington Garden account gives misleading

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impression that its berries authentically derived from the British royal tradition by ascribing them the expected characteristics.

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They dance from sunlight, still human children and for more domestic cleanliness, the silver coins.

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As the plot unfolds, however, his fairies are not engaged in the more traditional activities of folklore.

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When fairies variously reward, trick or punish human beings, sometimes helping them in domestic tasks,

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sometimes leading them into Barre Hills to participate in the kind of sweeping conflict found in classical epic to count.

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It draws attention to the incongruity between their size and behaviour by arming them with humorously small weapons that burn spears,

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for instance, resemble rows of needles.

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Finally, instead of seamlessly combining English diaries and classical deities in the same work to find humour in their jarring interactions.

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Despite what the name suggests, 18th century Wilderness Gardens were not designed to look like wild natural spaces,

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but to demonstrate the designer's ability to contain nature within hedges and zones.

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Creating sheltered walkways where visitors could lose themselves in intellectual and personal contemplation.

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Kensington Garden is a little remembered work of literature today.

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Nevertheless, it proved surprisingly influential over the 18th and 19th centuries,

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reprinted in multiple volumes over the period, as well as in collections of 2000 work.

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A number of Victorian local historians keen to ascribe a mystical back story to Kensington, repeated the claim that its name,

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derived from a fairy princess Kenna,

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encouraged their readers to sit in Kensington Gardens and enchant their surroundings by reimagining Celts fairies.

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Oh, where? Brown, for instance, wrote. We would ask our readers to step in, take a comfortable seat, say in the final book,

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and closing their eyes allow themselves to drift backwards, backwards to that remote period when fairies gambles on the silence.

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A golden age when all men were brave and honest and all women fair and true.

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A little to the north of where the palace now stands rose the dazzling domes and towers of the proud palace, the elfin king Oberon,

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and clustering around the dwelling place of their monarch were crowded streets and glittering spires of the capital of the fairy empire.

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As late as 1903, a new comic opera based on a poem opened at the Savoy Theatre,

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demonstrating that it continued to have a cultural afterlife since the period when J.M. Barrie was writing his works.

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Frustratingly, we don't know for certain whether Barry had to come in.

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If not, it still seems possible that he picked up on a cultural association between Barry's and Kenton's Gardens that persisted through 18th,

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19th and 20th century riffs onto Cal's work shortly after the publication of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,

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a contributor to Notes and Queries Group two, Cal and Barry, together as the Mythologised Barry Kensington.

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This story has broader implications for the ways in which we understand the relationship between real and imagined histories of place,

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the physical characteristics of the sunken terrace in a form to Cal's invented mythology

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and the ensuing fairy tradition changed the built environment of the public park.

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Visitors today can see the Peter Pan statue play in the Peter Pan themed playground on the cut out an oak installation,

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a calf tree stump decorated with fairies and woodland creatures.

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These complicated interactions between tangible and intangible heritage encourage us to look beyond disciplinary boundaries,

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not just between periods of time, but between literature, folklore, art, history and geography.

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Thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much.

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I think a whole new world said to me and I think I probably speak for everyone now.

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We're going to hear from Todd Bullock. Todd Bullock is senior lecturer in Renaissance drama at the University of Huddersfield.

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His research interests include Shakespeare and the pre-history of environmentalism,

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magic and Science, Repertory and Performance Studies and Global Shakespeare.

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He is the author of Eco Criticism and Early Modern English Literature, Green Pastures and Literature and Nature in the Renaissance,

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an eco critical anthology as well as over a dozen articles in journals.

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Right. Thank you, Diane. So my paper today is on the Witch of Edmonton, one of the great Jacobean witchcraft plays.

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I'm going to focus on it as a play about wetlands. Wetlands have long been a bastion of magical beliefs.

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Anyone who caught Alexandra and Diane's paper yesterday will not need much convincing that a whiff of the supernatural clippings about these places,

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as surely as the pungent stench of stagnant water.

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But back in the Anglo-Saxon era, the author of Beowulf tars Grendel's mother as a mere with or torn hag.

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While the Knight Century hagiography of St Pathak recounts his battles with misshapen bin dwelling demons.

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Tales of here at the Wake,

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the Normans employ a local cunning woman known as the Witch of Brandon to stretch out curses against the English rebels hiding out in the fence.

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And in the Jacobean period, the Weird Sisters [INAUDIBLE] broth includes the fillets of a funny snake.

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And of course, Caliban conjures infections from the fans to blast Prospero.

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In a 6019 protest ballad entitled The Police Complaint,

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the author calls upon all this Neptune in the moon to curse the developers that seek to drain and enclose the wetlands.

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Meanwhile, on the continent, the pontine marshes in Italy at the foot of Mount Cicero have long been linked with the sorceress,

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thirsty for back to antiquity. It's easy to fathom why magical beliefs would prove particularly pernicious in these sparsely populated backwaters.

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Not only were schools and churches few and far between,

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but rituals involving sympathetic magic would satisfy a deep yearning to exert some control over an unstable environment prone to flooding.

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Moreover, diseases afflicting humans and cattle are commonplace and the absence of germ theory.

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Finland communities desperate to find a scapegoat would be easily tempted to attribute an otherwise inexplicable outbreak to witchcraft.

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Now medical minded historians have proffered dozens of ingenious explanations for witchcraft and attempts that often

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portray the incapacity of the scientific mind to comprehend why the widespread faith in magic in pre-modern societies.

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Confessions of witchcraft, if not extracted under torture, must have been.

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It's often assumed, prompted by some psychotic episode brought on by ergot fungus poisoning,

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syphilis, Huntington's disease, Lyme disease, dementia, etc.

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Now, it's not the intent of this paper today to propose a reductive,

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magic bullet explanation to debunk a phenomenon that's linked with a vast complex of socio cultural forces,

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spiritual traditions and environmental factors. But if we turn from mythical and universal explanations of witchcraft to ask why it thrived

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in particular locales and the prevalence of magic in wetlands doesn't hurt further inquiry.

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Modern appreciation of wetlands has developed in the absence of a serious, often fatal disease that they want spawned.

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While malaria disappeared from the UK around the end of the First World War and it's now classed as an imported disease.

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It was once endemic in low lying areas along fens, marshes and estuaries.

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The reason we still seldom think of it in early modern England is that the mosquito a Spanish

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loan word first recorded in 1572 and only gradually adopted masqueraded as the fly or nets.

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While the world owed malaria borrowed from the Italian in 1740 was disguised under the term ague.

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The Ague could refer to any fever in general.

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But descriptions of Persian or cotton fevers, which flare up every third or fourth day, occur frequently in early modern texts.

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And they correspond exactly with the symptoms of Plasmodium vivax, a fever every other day, and Plasmodium malaria, a fever every 72 hours.

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William Harvey, the esteemed physician, suffered from malaria, as did Samuel peeps.

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And Oliver Cromwell contracted these Persian fevers. Daniel Defoe left a very colourful account of its virulence in the Essex marshes.

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Precise epidemiological data is, of course, hard to come by for the early modern era,

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but parish records indicate considerably higher rates of mortality near Marsh's the favoured breeding

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grounds of the NFL's ultra part of us that no native mosquito capable of transmitting malaria.

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As its etymology suggests, early moderns blamed malaria on bad air.

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But as far back as 1666, the physician,

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Thomas Sydenham wrote a detailed study on Persian fevers and drew a correlation between outbreaks and spikes in insect populations.

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When insects form extraordinarily, then argues and contains up here early about midsummer and the autumn proves very sickly.

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Most people prior to 1666, however, assumed that darker forces were at work.

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It's probably not coincidental that areas with extensive wetlands, such as the Fens, Essex, Kent,

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Somerset and the Ribble Valley in Lancashire witnessed disproportionately large numbers of witchcraft trials.

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Is it possible?

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I'm just going to throw this out there and see if anyone else finds this at all convincing that in addition to large moles or supernumerary nipples,

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that the swellings caused by mosquito bites might in some cases have been mistaken for the

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infamous witch's teat in which they allegedly suckled their impious familiars with blood.

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The connection between wetlands, malaria and witchcraft offers a fresh angle on which to view the wish of Edmondson.

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A good deal of commentary on this could be in place to determine whether it debunks witchcraft and decries Sawyer's

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execution or gleefully exploits her grisly fate for its entertainment value and colludes with misogyny and ageism.

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Another strand of scholarship focuses on the gender politics of the domestic tragedy,

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often attempting to clarify the linkages between the three plotlines focussed on respectively the bigamist Frank Thorney,

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the Witch Mother Sawyer and the clown Cody Banks.

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Little attention has been paid to the place. Environmental context.

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17th century Edmonton stood alongside substantial wetlands over a half mile wide on the Western Bank of the River Lee.

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A number of wetlands still in Girdle Edmonton to this day. Ramsey Marsh and Waltham O.

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Marsh spread out along its northern edges and Tottenham and Hackney Marshes lie to its south.

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The only reason we have forgotten about Edmondson Marsh is that much of it was

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obliterated by the construction of a series of reservoirs in the early 20th century.

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Jacobean Edmundson, however, was hugged by marshlands on its east,

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and it was reticulated by a number of tributaries of the LEA that oozed through it from the West.

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Mother Sawyer resided near at Winch Moor Hill on the western fringe of Edmonton,

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putting her in the vicinity of two such tributaries which I've shown here with the blue arrows.

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The Simons Brook to the north and more brook to itself through the tendency of water to stagnate and the slow flowing watercourses.

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The severely polluted Moor Brook was converted and buried in the 1950s, but in the early 17th century.

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It was essentially an open sewer and an ideal habitat for malaria breeding mosquitoes.

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Seen in the light of environmental history,

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it seems revealing that the Witch of Edmonds and Associates Mother Sawyer with dirty foul water in her first appearance in the play.

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Just because she happens to be poor, deformed and ignorant. The complains the people of Edmonds and malign her as a witch must I for that be made

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a common stink for all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues to fall and run into.

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The striking comparison of Sawyer to a sink could refer to a pool or pit formed in the ground for collecting wastewater or sewage.

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The metaphor may have been suggested by the near homophones of Sawyer and Sewer,

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but she complicates this by tracing the source of filth back to the community, back to her slanderous accusers.

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If the common sink is unsanitary, it's because the people have befouled it.

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By the same token, if she is a witch, the townsfolk have driven her to it by their constant recrimination.

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It's all one to be a witch must be counted. One, she says. A sink could also signify a low lying area where the flowing water collects and forms.

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It could be a marsh, a pool, a wetlands. A meaning that dates back to 1594, according to the OED.

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Whichever reading we prefer.

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The speech frames the presence of the witch in the community as analogous to an unhealthy cesspool or marsh afflicting the people with disease.

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They claim that she or speaks her cattle or speaks their cattle at which their corn themselves, their servants and their babies.

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That nurse. I'm sorry. I got tired of. An insightful reading of the play.

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In the opening monologue, Mary Ford Wilson remarks that it helps cast the witch as the most visibly identifiable source of contagion in the community.

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But what will sunglasses think as a reference to the sinful womb?

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Another considers what sicknesses might have been endemic in Edmonton in 1620.

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Don Fisher similarly reflects upon the play a sense of a correspondence between

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dirty water and women's bodies supposedly tainted by inspiration in childbirth.

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Revisiting this witchcraft play with an invite with an eye on environmental history

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is a place one could add that identifies another literal source of contagion

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in stagnant and polluted wetlands and watercourses that actually stood alongside

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Edmundson in the 17th century and would have been an incubator for malaria.

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Now the parish records of All Saints Edmondson, now in the London Metropolitan Archive,

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do not record causes of death, but archival evidence confirms that AGU was present there in the early 17th century.

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Don Clark, in his Trumpet of Apollo, touts his ague remedies and directs readers to persons who can vouch for their efficacy.

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Observing that Mistress Lead dwelling with Mistress Brett and her mother at Edmonton, having had a double quarantine a long time, was cured.

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In areas where marsh fever was rife, many would have turned to quack solvers or folk remedies peddled by wise women or cunning men.

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But those who had lost loved ones or precious cattle might blame vulnerable, disreputable people on the social margins for having coerced them.

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Is therefore ironic as well as tragic that Elizabeth Sawyer herself would have known this grief, this loss all too well.

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I discovered, to my shock in the archives last week of her 11 children, six of them died in infancy.

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The daughter named after her died upon Christmas 1597 at the age of one.

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The father in May, a boy, Ambrose, did not live through his first day in 1602.

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This is the year again that reports an AGU in Edmonton.

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Sawyer suffers a unspeakable series of losses to her two year old son, William, and two day old daughter Joanna.

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Both die on the same day, April 9th. Six weeks later, Joanna's twin sister, Mary, died.

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Now. I was almost crying in the archives. A number of factors such as malnourishment, that could have contributed to these premature deaths.

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But three and two months in the same household smacks of a transmissible disease,

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and the presence of marshes and polluted water around Edmonton points to a disease that's water borne or carried by water insects.

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Many adults recover from malaria, but the young do not fare so well.

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Malaria is known to trigger a devastating uptick in infant and child mortality, and infections during pregnancy often result in stillbirth.

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The inhabitants of Jacobean London were well aware of the health risks posed by clogged urban waterways,

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as attested by the writings of Thomas Decker, to whom scholars attribute the mother story of scenes in the play and the seven Deadly Sins of London.

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Dekker observes that standing water does nothing but gather corruption.

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News from Gravesend, co-written with Thomas Middleton, blames plague on bad air, sucked from standing pools from bogs from rank and Derbyshire.

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Fans solve this problem and supply a rapidly expanding London with clean water.

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The authorities had launched an ambitious hydro engineering project in the first decade of King James reign.

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The New River, which piped fresh water for amble springs near where to the conduit 13 well, north London.

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And this was delved through the western edge of Edmonton.

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The project was spearheaded by Money Baron Hugh Middleton, supported by King James,

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but encountered fierce opposition from local landowners who feared that diverting channels

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through their farmland would create quagmires that might drown cattle and of course,

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spread disease. Despite these qualms, the New River was completed in 16, 13 and six years later,

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the New River Company was incorporated by a royal charter, which makes it a criminal offence to dump rubbish into the river.

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Passage of this act suggests that pollution was a recognised problem in the New River in 1619, shortly before Sawyer was convicted.

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It invites us to interpret our persecution as the ritual cleansing of a befouled waterway,

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or think it's therefore striking that the New River was cut right through when Maryhill,

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the western flank of Edmonton, where Sawyer resided, introducing more water into an already modern flood prone area.

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When the Witch of Edmonton was first staged,

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the community at the apex would have been anxious about outsiders interfering with the white ones in their midst.

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While Londoners were increasingly conscious of their reliance upon the northern suburbs

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for clean water and would have been concerned by reports of outbreaks of witchcraft,

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of disease or witchcraft conjured diseases in places upstream such as Edmonton.

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Interestingly, Mother's story was not the only person compared to putrid water in the play before.

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It's another transcript. Analogy between bodies and what one's in the bigamy plot.

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When Frank Thorney exclaims, presumably while pounding on his chest.

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Or Here, here is the fin, when which this hydra of discontent grows rank occurring in the very next scene,

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after Sawyer's comparison of herself to a polluted think, the motive for filthy water serves to bind together the plotlines.

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The domestic tragedy plot in which Frank Thorne is compelled to marry Susan to secure a dowry.

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Despite having already wed, Winifred exposes the pervasive greed of the middle classes depicted in the play.

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More precisely, it's the cash strapped Gentry's greed for land of the acres owned by the yeoman

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farmer Carter that pressures Thorney to obey his father and marry Carter's daughter.

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The same hunger for land and their 17th century is driving the reclamation projects to drain and destroy the wetlands.

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The allusion here to learning Hydra may be classical,

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but these ominous references to wetlands as monstrous spaces conspire with these efforts to drain and enclose the wetlands.

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It is therefore somewhat curious that Sawyer's most bitter enemy in the play is a man named Banks.

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No person of that name appears in the play.

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Source The wonderful discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer by assigning her nemesis the name banks with its connotations of embankments.

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The playwrights frame this conflict between them not only in terms of rich versus poor

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and men versus women also is an elemental struggle between drylands and weapons.

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Giving the aspects of a fitful environmental allegory in so your first scene, Banks confronts her and accuses her of trespassing.

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What makes, though upon my Ground explained, she's gathering a few rotten sticks to warm me.

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An exchange that captures the stark realities of early modern fuel poverty.

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But the uncharitable banks drives away the old woman who has just been compared

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to dirty water with verbal and physical violence hanging out of my ground.

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The word ground appears a third time when Sawyer declares banks is the ground of all my scandal.

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And in the ensuing scene during his outburst about the thing within him is prompted by

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Susan's request to know the ground of his disturbance or the deliberately or subconsciously.

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The play draws a recurrent contrast between dry ground versus watery commons,

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associating the latter with a dolt stricken bigamist and a curse in which.

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The belief that marshes might be controlled through magical incantations, his voice in another place set in Edmundson,

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untitled The Merry Devil of Edmonton, which was a titular Magus, Peter Fable, who boasts he could conjure a flood along the river.

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Lea Well, first hand in field in such rings of mist, has never rose from any Derbyshire stand.

311
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I'll make the buried feet arise wherein drowned the marshes under the bridge.

312
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Feature ambitions.

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Brackish water surging southward from where in Hertfordshire, towards north London to the marshes here would include those in and around Edmondson.

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Amidst the floods or blame for disease outbreaks, papal speech has decidedly sinister overtones.

315
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This, beyond the loss of a few twigs, is the situation that the paranoid banks is trying to prevent.

316
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When he expels Sawyer from his ground behaving like actual banks constructed to hold back the creeks and marshes.

317
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Although Sawyer never conjures a flood, she does manage to temporarily drown.

318
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Banks the son, Cody Banks, in a comic scene memorably depicted on the title page of the 1621 play text.

319
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When Cutie asks the witch to help him seduce Kate Carter, she tells him to follow her dog.

320
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Are familiar who will lead him to the girl?

321
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Instead, the dog Cody identifies as a water spaniel, leads him into an unnamed body of water up to his neck.

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Katie cries offstage, Help, I'm drowned. I'm drowned here on the title page.

323
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And immediately after the stage direction.

324
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As Katie enters the wet and its comic dunking of the clown, the scene springs to recalls, dunk tanks and sponge tosses at village fits,

325
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which we might spy a benign recreation of sacrificial drownings and ancient rainmaking rituals.

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After all, Katie is adorned in the costume of a morris dancer in the scene,

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which some historians and early modern Puritans trace back to pre-Christian fertility rites.

328
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The scene also stages a reversal of the ducking of the which which Cuddy seems to allude to when he complains.

329
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Let's have no more of these ducking devices. But he survived this ordeal.

330
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But the scene does play on fears of thinking and flooding in marshland communities.

331
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Audiences in 1621 familiar with the topography of Greater London would have likely

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inferred that Curry has been plunged into the marshes and the edge of Edmondson.

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Black magic cannot bring Marsh to the town. It brings the townsfolk to and into the marsh.

334
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Which if Edmonton also furnishes evidence that early modern believed witches were vectors for malaria like illnesses.

335
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In a scene that anticipates Wordsworth, Guinea,

336
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Blake and Harry deal for your curses or plagues not with an eternal chill, but with physical pain by bones.

337
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They include joints, cramp, convulsions, stretch and crack.

338
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They sinews along with fever and chills. Muscle and joint pain are among the most common conspicuous symptoms of malaria.

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Bone loss and periodontitis are also characteristic of chronic malaria, which forensic archaeologists can detect through skeletal deterioration.

340
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This supports the conjecture that Sawyer may have suffered from malaria herself since good kill reports in the pamphlet.

341
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She was crooked and deformed, even bending together as illustrated by the portrait of her on the title page of both the

342
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pamphlet in the play and the playwrights compare it to a a bow buckled and bent together.

343
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Malaria patients also frequently develop anaemia.

344
00:33:43,400 --> 00:33:49,040
And good call. Describe Sergio's complexion as pale and ghostlike, without any blood at all.

345
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Oh yes. Unsightly appearance would have led the people of 17th century Edmonton to conclude she was afflicted with a disfiguring disease,

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while the dread that it was transmissible was seemingly borne out by the fact so many of her own children had died.

347
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No wonder she was shunned and hated like a sickness.

348
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The community's fear of her may have led her to credit herself with the power to infect others, which is precisely what happens in the play.

349
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Banks accusations of an abuse drives voyeurs into indulging in revenge fantasies.

350
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Diseases, plagues, the curses of an old woman follow and fall upon you.

351
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50 lines later, she repeats. The similar curse rots and formalities it up and time.

352
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Retaliating with these curses for your echoes, the invectives of the deformed Caliban.

353
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All the infections of the sun sucks up from fogs bends flat sun prosper fall.

354
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In his first appearance in the play, Caliban has implied that his mother gathered wicked due from an unwholesome fen.

355
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The practice malavika and the people of Edmonton seem to suspect mother saw Europe doing the same,

356
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but rather than sprinkle wicked do from a raven feather, one who dispatches her dog, who bewitched the townsfolk by touching them.

357
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Play here, I think, taps into fears of zoonotic transmission of diseases like malaria in early modern England.

358
00:35:02,370 --> 00:35:05,610
The archival research that undergirds this paper suggests another story.

359
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It may have been both a factor and a victim of malaria.

360
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And knowing that she not only suffered physical pain, but the psychological trauma of losing six children.

361
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Further, what the Jacobean playwrights work with, but shy away from her elevation to tragic stature.

362
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To conclude, I want to think about how we could compare the situation in Edmonton with studies of malaria and witchcraft in other parts of the world.

363
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Research and ethnographic research in Africa has shown that it's very common for malaria to be blamed on black magic.

364
00:35:39,500 --> 00:35:45,620
Researchers in Gambia found a malaria was attributed to blue are witches who are believed to conjure a foul wind,

365
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the sick, the life force of the bewitched. But magic and science aren't mutually exclusive in places like West or South Africa.

366
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A survey of the advocacy in Kenya revealed that while 80% accept that mosquitoes can be a vector, 34% still attribute malaria to witchcraft.

367
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And the Bermuda and Cameroon subscribed to the notion that witches can infect people with disease,

368
00:36:06,860 --> 00:36:10,849
but also tell an ideological myth that malaria arrived in their community when a thief

369
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switched a bag supposed to contain the ancestors blessings with a bag full of mosquitoes.

370
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Many medical studies lament the supposed persistence of such beliefs and assume if people were better educated,

371
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they would seek proper Western treatments rather than consult witchcraft.

372
00:36:25,920 --> 00:36:28,079
Which doctors? Well, well, meaning.

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Such studies can be, of course, patronising faith in quack remedies and anti-scientific sentiments persist in the ostensibly enlightened West,

374
00:36:35,520 --> 00:36:37,830
as COVID 19 is made painfully clear.

375
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And historians of magic, I think, would do well to keep that in mind when drawing on ethnographic studies of witchcraft from outside Europe.

376
00:36:43,920 --> 00:36:49,590
Comparisons between contemporary rural Africa and early modern England can unwittingly imply that the former remains mired in a primitive,

377
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pre-modern past. But it's easy to trouble such assumptions with a thought experiment or a show of hands.

378
00:36:55,740 --> 00:37:00,540
How many of you among us today have seen a microscopic app, a complex and protozoan parasite?

379
00:37:01,800 --> 00:37:06,150
Imagine trying to explain Plasmodium vivax to inhabitants of Edmonton in 1621.

380
00:37:06,750 --> 00:37:11,309
Why not, say, demon anthropologist to treat these folks properly, seriously?

381
00:37:11,310 --> 00:37:13,020
And the same goes for historians of magic.

382
00:37:13,530 --> 00:37:19,589
Proposing a link between malaria amplification and early modern England, this paper is not so much a plea for disenchantment as a provocation.

383
00:37:19,590 --> 00:37:25,350
To think more about our understanding of witchcraft can be enriched by eco medical eco feminist approaches.

384
00:37:26,270 --> 00:37:26,660
Thank you.

385
00:37:27,410 --> 00:37:39,110
Amy Blakemore is a novelist whose first novel, The Manningtree Witches, actually managed to appeal to me as an accurate representation of witchcraft.

386
00:37:39,320 --> 00:37:42,770
It would be great to hear from Amy if she's ready to comment.

387
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:50,450
I am AK Blakemore for Amy, my debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, which came out a couple of years ago now.

388
00:37:50,480 --> 00:37:56,900
I can never quite remember when precisely because of the kind of dilatory COVID time that we went through,

389
00:37:57,560 --> 00:38:03,950
but is about the early career of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder general in Manningtree.

390
00:38:04,500 --> 00:38:08,210
Manningtree is a place I know very well, a small town in Essex.

391
00:38:08,600 --> 00:38:17,390
In fact, I believe it is the smallest town in England that still qualifies as a town about 10 minutes on the train outside of Colchester.

392
00:38:17,420 --> 00:38:23,000
I'm sure a lot of you would have passed through it on your way to vastly more metropolitan Norwich.

393
00:38:24,140 --> 00:38:29,720
And yes, a place I know well because my dad was there. So I'm down there kind of a few times a year.

394
00:38:30,260 --> 00:38:35,510
And real and imagined histories as a phrase, is something that's very interesting to me,

395
00:38:35,900 --> 00:38:44,959
because one of the things that sort of interested me most when I began writing the novel was almost the less the story itself and more the

396
00:38:44,960 --> 00:38:52,880
way the history and in fact the myth of the which find a general has been transformed and revised by Manningtree and its inhabitants.

397
00:38:54,270 --> 00:39:00,690
The last time I was down in Manningtree, I was giving a talk to a local book group at the Thorne of Mossley,

398
00:39:00,990 --> 00:39:07,590
which of course historically, although it's disputed was the in the which find a general himself orange and brown.

399
00:39:08,010 --> 00:39:14,080
It's still there and it's now fairly boujee gastropub with some rooms above.

400
00:39:14,100 --> 00:39:21,719
If you're ever passing through it, it's great. Can recommend it. So after talking to this group, I decided to have a glass of wine at the bar.

401
00:39:21,720 --> 00:39:25,860
And I was talking to the barman and he was discussing the book.

402
00:39:26,010 --> 00:39:33,090
They sell little postcards of the frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins book, and he said,

403
00:39:33,120 --> 00:39:37,800
I love taking people when they're staying at the pub to the room upstairs where he died.

404
00:39:38,340 --> 00:39:41,850
And I was kind of, oh, there's a room that he supposedly died in. Which one?

405
00:39:41,850 --> 00:39:43,679
And he says, well, whichever one they're staying in,

406
00:39:43,680 --> 00:39:50,220
obviously every Halloween in the high streets at Manningtree, there is a witch finding competition.

407
00:39:50,730 --> 00:39:54,950
And what this involves is Barbie dolls wearing little fellows,

408
00:39:54,960 --> 00:40:01,590
which hats that are left around the centre of town and the local children are exhorted to find them.

409
00:40:02,340 --> 00:40:09,510
The information about this, the signs put up and shop windows and stuff are very, very careful to stress that you are finding them to save them.

410
00:40:09,510 --> 00:40:15,870
From Matthew Hawkins, the witch find a general rather than to subject them to carceral violence as a sort of

411
00:40:16,320 --> 00:40:21,690
equivocal ity about the way that Manningtree interacts with its history in this regard.

412
00:40:22,680 --> 00:40:25,890
Manningtree is now pretty much a commuter town.

413
00:40:26,640 --> 00:40:30,030
It's very sparse, quiet and has a vaguely.

414
00:40:30,390 --> 00:40:36,150
It's a very nebulous term, but most energy, I would say, as so many small towns in England do.

415
00:40:36,840 --> 00:40:44,430
Matthew Watkins was, I think, most memorably portrayed by Vincent Price and the Witchfinder film,

416
00:40:44,910 --> 00:40:49,890
which is I'm kind of a massive fan of sixties, seventies schlock, folk horror.

417
00:40:50,310 --> 00:40:56,910
So obviously I love the Witchfinder film. The tagline for which was England has never looked so beautiful or been so evil.

418
00:40:57,450 --> 00:41:01,560
And a great part of it was filmed in a village near Manningtree Laburnum,

419
00:41:01,860 --> 00:41:06,510
which retains a lot more of its original 16th century and Tudor architecture.

420
00:41:07,760 --> 00:41:12,530
And it put me in mind of the fact that Manningtree is slap bang in the middle of

421
00:41:12,530 --> 00:41:17,310
constable country in which an area of Essex known for its particularly beautiful light.

422
00:41:17,330 --> 00:41:24,650
Manningtree itself is just a few miles down the road from Fulford Mill, which is where Constable painted the famous hay wing.

423
00:41:25,070 --> 00:41:33,530
And one of the things that's really interested me in writing hasn't cool literature is what I sometimes call it more or less as a joke,

424
00:41:33,980 --> 00:41:37,790
but is the interface between beauty and horror.

425
00:41:37,790 --> 00:41:42,469
And I think it's something that is really typified by a place like Manningtree,

426
00:41:42,470 --> 00:41:50,810
which has such a dark history, but also such associations with the pastoral of peace and beauty as well.

427
00:41:51,290 --> 00:41:54,230
This idea of wetlands is something that is very striking to me.

428
00:41:54,590 --> 00:42:01,070
So Manningtree is right near to the castle marshes in Essex, but it is also bang slap on the middle of the star estuary.

429
00:42:02,180 --> 00:42:08,360
And one of the things that I've always found most striking about Running Tree and the Star Street itself is it's a tidal estuary.

430
00:42:08,360 --> 00:42:15,560
So water runs in, a mortar runs out on a daily basis, but the extent to which it completely changes the landscape.

431
00:42:16,160 --> 00:42:20,090
So when the tide is in, it's an incredibly deep estuary.

432
00:42:20,090 --> 00:42:25,940
There are boats on it. You can fish there. And when the water runs out, it leaves flats.

433
00:42:26,090 --> 00:42:34,729
It almost looks as though you could walk across it from manningtree to the other side and the landscape is completely transfigured.

434
00:42:34,730 --> 00:42:41,270
And I suppose I was very interested into what that would have felt like and that changing

435
00:42:41,270 --> 00:42:46,339
landscape to the people who lived there in the mid 17th century and notably the estuary,

436
00:42:46,340 --> 00:42:50,660
was also during the English Civil War and before known as smuggling routes,

437
00:42:51,110 --> 00:42:55,249
something that kind of interested me about Essex at this time or busy,

438
00:42:55,250 --> 00:43:03,920
which county was the extent to which I feel like it must have felt during the English Civil War, especially like more or less the frontier.

439
00:43:03,950 --> 00:43:11,420
Not because the war really came to us until later, but because of the fear of Catholic invasion from the continent.

440
00:43:11,870 --> 00:43:19,340
And the smuggling was a very typical time that went on through Essex with the Star Estuary running from the coast down towards London.

441
00:43:19,760 --> 00:43:23,360
But also Catolica was smuggled across that waterway.

442
00:43:23,840 --> 00:43:30,110
The community on a macro level of Manningtree has dealt with and faced its own history in terms of

443
00:43:30,110 --> 00:43:37,399
both the Witchfinder almost becoming a cottage industry within the town which walks local museums,

444
00:43:37,400 --> 00:43:43,250
things like that, trees that have basically become sites of pilgrimage because witches were believed to have hidden there.

445
00:43:43,790 --> 00:43:49,040
But also the way we think about our history on a more national basis.

446
00:43:49,370 --> 00:43:54,709
I was educated at state school in London and in the early 2000,

447
00:43:54,710 --> 00:44:00,290
which was where I went to secondary school and in writing the book I was very

448
00:44:00,290 --> 00:44:04,790
much reminded of the paucity of my own knowledge around the English Civil War.

449
00:44:05,150 --> 00:44:09,380
And this is as someone who specialised in the early modern period university.

450
00:44:10,440 --> 00:44:16,260
And I came to the conclusion that the reason we don't really learn about the English Civil War, I certainly did.

451
00:44:16,310 --> 00:44:21,690
And anecdotally, having spoken about this with friends of my generation, they didn't either.

452
00:44:21,750 --> 00:44:25,050
The English Civil War was just not something that we ever dealt with,

453
00:44:25,860 --> 00:44:33,540
is because it felt like the English Civil War couldn't really be integrated into a sort of nationalistic

454
00:44:33,540 --> 00:44:40,530
narrative almost that I felt my certainly my secondary level of history education promoted.

455
00:44:40,920 --> 00:44:43,050
There aren't really heroes on either side,

456
00:44:43,380 --> 00:44:51,900
and that was something that was a larger version of the confronting of history that I was looking at in Manningtree itself.

457
00:44:52,110 --> 00:44:54,360
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you, Diane.

458
00:44:57,130 --> 00:45:05,440
Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for a really thoughtful and careful explication of your any engagement with pace.

459
00:45:06,160 --> 00:45:13,450
We also have with us the outstanding, amazing, wise woman of fantasy studies.

460
00:45:13,450 --> 00:45:19,840
Ellen Kushner. If you haven't read Ellen's Magnificent Thomas the primer rush straight to Amazon now.

461
00:45:20,170 --> 00:45:24,640
So now we're going to hear from Ellen. Welcome and looking forward to your talk.

462
00:45:24,790 --> 00:45:25,690
Thank you very much.

463
00:45:26,170 --> 00:45:37,840
I'd like to speak about my relationship to the land and to the land of British folklore and myth through my novel Thomas the Rhymer.

464
00:45:38,740 --> 00:45:42,790
I cannot claim that Thomas was the first thing that grabbed me.

465
00:45:42,790 --> 00:45:47,229
It was still my best friend as a young teen, and she was obsessed with it.

466
00:45:47,230 --> 00:45:51,639
And she was a woman of mystery and creativity. And we talked a lot about Thomas.

467
00:45:51,640 --> 00:45:58,840
The Rhymer tried to find the original tune Mutually Despised, the Stylise banned version.

468
00:45:59,110 --> 00:46:02,290
But eventually it came to be part of my own inner landscape.

469
00:46:03,470 --> 00:46:08,030
When I came to write the novel, it was entirely because Terry Wendling,

470
00:46:08,030 --> 00:46:15,979
who is a substantial editor at the time and had already invited writers to write contemporary fantasy novels based on fairy tale or ace books,

471
00:46:15,980 --> 00:46:21,440
where she was the fantasy editor. And someone else asked her would she do the same thing based on Ballard's?

472
00:46:21,710 --> 00:46:26,540
Terry was living in my back room at the time. And I said, If you have anyone else, Thomas, I'll kill you.

473
00:46:26,630 --> 00:46:28,910
Because I've always wanted to be the one to read about Thomas.

474
00:46:29,450 --> 00:46:32,840
And she said, Oh, dear, I did give it to somebody else, but let me see if I can get it back.

475
00:46:33,050 --> 00:46:40,040
And she did. When I was in university, I was in a play writing class, and I had to write a one act play.

476
00:46:40,430 --> 00:46:45,890
And what I ended up writing was a one act play called The Homecoming of True Thomas the Rhymer,

477
00:46:46,520 --> 00:46:52,730
in which you find out what happens after the rhymer returns from Ellis Island with the gift of the tongue that cannot lie.

478
00:46:53,570 --> 00:47:01,690
And that laid out him, the woman he'd left, and the lovable elderly shepherd and his wife, who were sort of his adopted parents.

479
00:47:01,700 --> 00:47:06,540
I created all of those for that little one act play. Suddenly I had to write a novel.

480
00:47:06,950 --> 00:47:11,390
And my previous novel, my first novel, Swords Point, had taken me seven years to write.

481
00:47:11,780 --> 00:47:14,510
And I did this one in about seven weeks because I had a deadline.

482
00:47:14,960 --> 00:47:22,280
But I was also assisted by the fact that everything in it comes from British folklore and specifically the folklore of the borders.

483
00:47:22,640 --> 00:47:27,620
And when you're a teenager and you're obsessed, this is what you learn.

484
00:47:27,820 --> 00:47:32,750
You know, you just kind of follow your passions. And so I had a lot of it to hand.

485
00:47:33,260 --> 00:47:41,300
I did a little bit of research, but not too much. The one thing I had never done was be on the land where the story takes place.

486
00:47:41,900 --> 00:47:46,610
And I would like to say that the whole novel was written in the landscape of dream.

487
00:47:46,970 --> 00:47:50,590
I mean, Thomas the Rhymer was apparently a historical figure.

488
00:47:50,930 --> 00:47:57,979
And there are documents and things that, you know, in 1138, he only gives land to his son or something like that.

489
00:47:57,980 --> 00:48:03,680
I'm sorry, I don't have my fingers chips anymore. But I didn't really try to set it in a truly historical setting.

490
00:48:03,680 --> 00:48:11,030
It's set in the land of the olden days, when minstrels walked the hills and occasionally run into the Queen of Elf Land.

491
00:48:11,780 --> 00:48:16,549
So I did a draft of the novel, but I knew that I needed to know what the hills looked like.

492
00:48:16,550 --> 00:48:20,570
And this was in 1985. There was no Internet.

493
00:48:20,990 --> 00:48:25,970
And I was a poor student, not a student, but I was living the life of a poor student.

494
00:48:26,300 --> 00:48:30,800
And I was in Boston. I had moved to Boston at that time.

495
00:48:31,370 --> 00:48:37,580
And I went to a famous bookshop downtown called the Globe Bookshop.

496
00:48:37,610 --> 00:48:44,360
And this was before the Internet, you know, so people are still bought travel books and still bought coffee table books of beautiful places.

497
00:48:44,780 --> 00:48:52,690
And I found the very expensive coffee table book of photos of the Scots borders.

498
00:48:53,630 --> 00:49:02,000
And I was too cheap, I think, or too poor to poor and too cheap, mostly too cheap to buy it.

499
00:49:02,210 --> 00:49:09,020
So I basically sat in a corner very quietly of the Distinguished Globe Bookshop in downtown Boston,

500
00:49:09,290 --> 00:49:12,530
leafing through this book of photographs and taking notes.

501
00:49:14,070 --> 00:49:23,340
That fall, the World Fantasy Convention was held in London, and a friend of mine, the writer Jane Yolen,

502
00:49:23,670 --> 00:49:28,140
said, We'll come up to Edinburgh because that's where she and her husband were staying at the time.

503
00:49:28,200 --> 00:49:34,589
She's from Massachusetts. And stay with us and we'll go out and look at the borders and you can see the Golden

504
00:49:34,590 --> 00:49:38,820
Hills and get a sense of what it really looks like so that you can get it into your book.

505
00:49:39,600 --> 00:49:44,790
So I took the train up to Edinburgh and I remember I had sort of fallen asleep and as we

506
00:49:44,790 --> 00:49:49,410
started getting into the borders I woke up and looked out and I saw the beauty of it.

507
00:49:49,860 --> 00:49:57,720
I just started crying, not because of any association with Thomas, because it turned out that I'm kind of wired for the look of those hills.

508
00:49:58,680 --> 00:50:00,880
Jane and I went out for a drive the next day.

509
00:50:00,900 --> 00:50:05,540
She was very brave because she was driving stick shift on the wrong side of the road, which usually her husband did.

510
00:50:05,550 --> 00:50:09,330
But he was I think he had a fever. So she took me out. It was very kind of her.

511
00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:16,170
And we ended up driving out to Earlston just because it was a place on the map that was aerosol doon.

512
00:50:16,470 --> 00:50:22,630
And we went out there and found the Thomas the Rymer Cafe in Earlston.

513
00:50:22,660 --> 00:50:26,040
We thought, Wow, what a bit of luck. Went in to have a cup of tea.

514
00:50:26,520 --> 00:50:30,870
And I said that I was delighted to be there because of Thomas the rhymer.

515
00:50:30,870 --> 00:50:32,820
And they said, Oh, this tower is right out back.

516
00:50:33,420 --> 00:50:42,360
I had no idea this was not in the highly expensive coffee table book about the Scots porters and Earlston was not in any tourist book that I knew of.

517
00:50:42,870 --> 00:50:46,829
So there it was, out back the ruins of Thomas the Reimers Tower.

518
00:50:46,830 --> 00:50:53,220
Whether he actually ever lived in it or not, who knows? It was probably a 16th century keeper or something like that.

519
00:50:53,460 --> 00:51:00,390
But there it was. And I it. We went out driving to the old Bean Hills, and I think we must have seen Thomas the Rolling Stone,

520
00:51:00,390 --> 00:51:07,470
which was there and walked and walked and just caught the feel of what it's like to walk those hills.

521
00:51:08,100 --> 00:51:15,840
Very beautiful, by the way. We spent a few days up around Hawick as it is pronounced creek.

522
00:51:17,160 --> 00:51:24,450
I see K on a sheep farm because I wanted to return to that area and it looked very beautiful and like a wonderful place to rest.

523
00:51:25,140 --> 00:51:28,550
I was distressed because I said, this isn't quite right.

524
00:51:28,560 --> 00:51:33,870
I mean, I'm here and it's beautiful and I love it, but it isn't giving me that thrust to the heart of that.

525
00:51:34,890 --> 00:51:38,640
I remember from the northern hills and the hills of the border.

526
00:51:39,210 --> 00:51:45,700
So on our way back up to Glasgow, we went to Earlston and drove around the Eldon Hills and there it was again.

527
00:51:46,260 --> 00:51:48,630
And do you think the difference was the trees?

528
00:51:48,810 --> 00:51:55,200
That there were no trees around really on the hillside except these kind of depressing plantations of pines,

529
00:51:55,650 --> 00:52:02,910
whereas there's a lot of various sorts of greenery set against the barrenness and bleakness and ruggedness of the hills.

530
00:52:03,300 --> 00:52:07,050
Thank you. Thank you very much for that.

531
00:52:07,380 --> 00:52:12,570
First to be introduced is Leah Tilly, an archaeologist,

532
00:52:12,570 --> 00:52:19,590
specifically an Oxford botanist and training palaeontologist palaeontologist whose

533
00:52:19,590 --> 00:52:26,190
focus is on pre-history and environmental reconstruction by a plant focussed proxies.

534
00:52:26,610 --> 00:52:30,840
Let's get started with Leah's presentation. Thank you all very much.

535
00:52:31,950 --> 00:52:40,590
Chipping Norton is an Iron Age cohort in lowland Scotland and it is rather special, has had extensive excavations.

536
00:52:41,250 --> 00:52:49,080
I've really wanted to explain where I'm coming from in terms of my own understanding of these systems.

537
00:52:49,620 --> 00:52:52,800
Now this is a tangent, so again, bear with me,

538
00:52:53,310 --> 00:53:00,209
but when it comes to defining in naturalists minds and conjure your typical Victorian curiosity collector,

539
00:53:00,210 --> 00:53:05,880
perhaps on a similar ethical level to an antiquarian and which aren't simply derided.

540
00:53:06,250 --> 00:53:11,819
I have a definition without socio cultural over time defines the naturalist simply as

541
00:53:11,820 --> 00:53:16,980
someone who knows rather a lot about the natural world and the natural objects within it.

542
00:53:17,790 --> 00:53:23,730
I suggest then all individuals across time were or are to some extent naturalists.

543
00:53:24,330 --> 00:53:27,420
This is a generalist. I recognise those are dangerous.

544
00:53:28,870 --> 00:53:36,310
But based on the basic definition, I think it is even possible to suggest that prehistoric communities were the pioneers of natural history.

545
00:53:37,450 --> 00:53:42,009
This has been the mental equivalent of an earworm for me throughout my own research,

546
00:53:42,010 --> 00:53:48,249
and it was perhaps begun by this very text to which I managed to excavate from a very dusty bookshop,

547
00:53:48,250 --> 00:53:56,200
which paradoxically I've not been able to find since. So this is against what I believe, actually, in a sense,

548
00:53:56,350 --> 00:54:05,329
because if a taste for nature correlates directly as estate with the maturing of a civilisation, then where is the nebulous beginning of this taste?

549
00:54:05,330 --> 00:54:11,980
The nature? Now, if we add to the definition of a naturalistic type of close study of natural objects

550
00:54:12,430 --> 00:54:17,110
and experimentation in order to define the qualities of these same objects,

551
00:54:17,620 --> 00:54:20,980
then prehistoric communities, perhaps more than any others,

552
00:54:21,400 --> 00:54:28,810
are becoming via these mechanisms more knowledgeable beyond the utilitarian considerations of known subsistence,

553
00:54:29,440 --> 00:54:33,280
their definition was certainly different, perhaps more animistic,

554
00:54:33,280 --> 00:54:43,360
but that does not necessarily imply the ability to overwhelm or terrify only a deeper level of respect with nature and the landscape itself.

555
00:54:44,050 --> 00:54:49,690
And it is also clear that with knowledge or understanding does not come a cessation of fear.

556
00:54:50,910 --> 00:54:53,970
I feel capacity to bear is unfortunately endless.

557
00:54:55,180 --> 00:54:58,810
But specifically these first applying to ancient communities.

558
00:54:58,840 --> 00:55:08,300
Well, how can that be when communities of naturalists, which is who I believe these people are constantly freed themselves via knowledge.

559
00:55:09,010 --> 00:55:17,190
This is not invalidated by some of this knowledge associating with categories of the sacred or indeed the ritual aspects of magic.

560
00:55:17,200 --> 00:55:22,750
Because as we all know, these have as much value as any other consideration.

561
00:55:23,410 --> 00:55:29,559
The landscape itself is formed of differential erosion, and what you really need to take away from this aspect,

562
00:55:29,560 --> 00:55:33,140
at least, is that this is a premium agricultural landscape.

563
00:55:33,160 --> 00:55:35,320
It has been for thousands of years,

564
00:55:35,560 --> 00:55:44,380
and this has fed into how individuals interacted with this landscape from the very beginning, including in the Neolithic.

565
00:55:44,740 --> 00:55:50,470
The sites were more ritual in nature, quite understandably, because these are hunter gatherer communities.

566
00:55:50,980 --> 00:55:55,630
And then agricultural intensification came at same time as large scale,

567
00:55:55,960 --> 00:56:03,550
rather brutal landscape clearance in some instances in the Iron Age with agricultural intensification.

568
00:56:04,570 --> 00:56:08,230
This is a highly ritualised landscape during the Neolithic and Bronze Age,

569
00:56:08,620 --> 00:56:15,909
also arguably the Iron Age, where conscious construction decisions were influenced by the landscape,

570
00:56:15,910 --> 00:56:25,600
geomorphology and a predetermined profile, and what environmental conditions were required for the foundation of a ritual site.

571
00:56:25,960 --> 00:56:33,790
I should note that I am not 100% equating ritual with magic or the other way around, but they are all very interlinked.

572
00:56:33,790 --> 00:56:39,399
And because this is pre-history, we don't have any necessarily written documentation.

573
00:56:39,400 --> 00:56:45,280
So I'm having to give you a bit of a and nebulous concept of the entire thing.

574
00:56:46,150 --> 00:56:54,850
One of the predetermined factors associated with situation of these sites is that they aren't higher elevations or slaves.

575
00:56:55,780 --> 00:57:02,020
As a hill site, tripping is a bit different and in an expansive sea of archaeological contention.

576
00:57:02,470 --> 00:57:08,620
Cunliffe stated in 2006 that there may be no such thing as an atypical hill fort.

577
00:57:09,370 --> 00:57:16,930
And from that site in the West SEAL sorts project, he still tried to define what the criterion for defining a hill fort were,

578
00:57:17,770 --> 00:57:22,810
and one of those was that it would be situated in a dominant position.

579
00:57:22,990 --> 00:57:26,830
Not a dominant position does not necessarily mean high elevation.

580
00:57:26,860 --> 00:57:30,970
It just means that it is an important area in the landscape.

581
00:57:31,420 --> 00:57:33,490
Could even be the conjunction of two rivers.

582
00:57:34,540 --> 00:57:41,650
On the whole, all of the sites on the east Lothian coastal plain and there are more than 20 are situated in dominant positions.

583
00:57:41,860 --> 00:57:48,249
The ritual sites, however, are almost always situated on points of high elevation.

584
00:57:48,250 --> 00:57:51,340
And this is something which makes them distinct campaign.

585
00:57:51,350 --> 00:57:55,300
No, not previously thought of as much of a ritual site.

586
00:57:55,720 --> 00:58:05,440
So that's a little bit intriguing. What exists is a network of sites connected through direct line of sight in many instances

587
00:58:05,500 --> 00:58:10,540
to the centralised point or to pain or eye contact is the foundation of human connection.

588
00:58:11,230 --> 00:58:16,660
The building blocks from which we construct the metaphysical boundary is how we perceive other human beings.

589
00:58:17,730 --> 00:58:25,440
Through this. We also form our intentions in terms of our relationship to objects, people,

590
00:58:25,440 --> 00:58:33,629
places that this concept is intentionally incorporated into a network of ritual sites suggests that prehistoric

591
00:58:33,630 --> 00:58:42,630
communities actively manipulated time and place factors to form connections between natural objects within the landscape.

592
00:58:43,290 --> 00:58:49,120
And that is pretty cool. So in the beginning there existed the environment.

593
00:58:49,140 --> 00:58:59,850
According to the preliminary tract in a lot of the pulling diagram, which was in its essence, a wilderness, a vast expanse of flat wilderness.

594
00:59:00,420 --> 00:59:07,080
Then collectives as individuals made a decision and a concerted effort was made not to reform this landscape,

595
00:59:07,200 --> 00:59:12,900
but create monuments within it, which melded seamlessly into the fabric of the landscape.

596
00:59:13,590 --> 00:59:19,140
These Neolithic and Bronze Age ritual sites further from the mundane use of local natural materials,

597
00:59:19,350 --> 00:59:23,910
constructed spaces which lived within the environment,

598
00:59:24,720 --> 00:59:33,990
interacted actively with it, were not disparate, despite the overt connotations of clearance, which suggests some level of destruction.

599
00:59:34,860 --> 00:59:42,690
Indeed, areas were cleared. Artificial constructions were situated where previously natural objects dominated,

600
00:59:42,930 --> 00:59:46,890
but these were perhaps deliberately not so distinct from each other.

601
00:59:48,120 --> 00:59:53,250
So the prime example I have of this in the eastern coastal plain is Pancake Hill,

602
00:59:53,670 --> 01:00:01,350
at which during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age there was an organised program of ritual clearance.

603
01:00:02,280 --> 01:00:09,540
This was done through small in-situ burning events, numerous tiny fires across the landscape of this site.

604
01:00:10,290 --> 01:00:17,310
And after these fires were burned out. And these fires were mainly oak and alder based.

605
01:00:18,000 --> 01:00:25,260
After these fires burn, the hearth would be ripped out and the spread of the ashes would go right across the site.

606
01:00:26,220 --> 01:00:32,160
And this would happen over and over again so that it goes beyond just clearance.

607
01:00:33,120 --> 01:00:43,990
Now, why they were doing this? Well, that's the question. So could it be a cleansing of the area or could it be more about the visual aspects?

608
01:00:44,010 --> 01:00:50,790
This ash would have coloured that site. It would have been noticeable and quite impressive.

609
01:00:51,360 --> 01:00:59,700
Now this clearance is clearly different from clearances at other sites of a more occupation based site like Standing Stone,

610
01:01:00,000 --> 01:01:06,830
which isn't that far away, in which clearances were undertaken under similar right in a similar style.

611
01:01:06,840 --> 01:01:11,340
So they were small burning events, but these were more associated with cleanliness.

612
01:01:11,700 --> 01:01:19,110
There weren't numerous burning events across the site, this one and all of the material would be gathered and then put in to that burning event.

613
01:01:19,860 --> 01:01:25,800
So there are obvious motivations for landscape clearance and some of them that are mundane, like at Standing Stone.

614
01:01:26,370 --> 01:01:30,570
Yet there was also a clear dialogue between embodiments of environments.

615
01:01:31,050 --> 01:01:38,970
These could arguably even be the natural objects in this case the plants themselves and the immediate subsistence and survival of communities.

616
01:01:39,330 --> 01:01:47,700
Whilst Woodland was a marginalised environment, an iron age, perhaps a more sacred space due to earlier association with ritual sites.

617
01:01:47,910 --> 01:01:51,480
There's evidence that these stands were given space to breathe.

618
01:01:52,170 --> 01:01:57,120
The arboreal species profiles, after all, are more indicative of a secondary woodland,

619
01:01:57,300 --> 01:02:02,340
which is a type of environmental space which is typified by regeneration.

620
01:02:03,330 --> 01:02:10,440
This is the extent that evidence indicates that woodlands encroached on agricultural systems that were hard fought in the beginning.

621
01:02:11,160 --> 01:02:15,720
And instead of getting rid of this encroachment,

622
01:02:16,470 --> 01:02:24,330
what communities did is they built a buffer zone around agricultural systems of virtual waste ground plant communities,

623
01:02:24,690 --> 01:02:28,350
and that existed as a boundary between these two environments.

624
01:02:29,070 --> 01:02:34,740
Woodland was rare in this landscape at this point. The resources were precious and the space.

625
01:02:34,740 --> 01:02:37,950
This was a significant aspect of a sacred memory state.

626
01:02:38,550 --> 01:02:45,090
Natural objects, specifically plants were maintained not just in terms of wider plant communities,

627
01:02:45,360 --> 01:02:48,540
but they also had individual specialist significance.

628
01:02:48,960 --> 01:02:56,370
And that was assigned particularly at Precision Road East and west to Henbury now has been is a really cool

629
01:02:56,370 --> 01:03:03,340
plant and it's incredibly uncommon in Scotland even today in pre-history it was probably even more uncommon.

630
01:03:03,360 --> 01:03:12,240
So there is a potential that they actively encouraged the growth of this plant and as a plant it has optical properties,

631
01:03:12,600 --> 01:03:15,210
including it being narcotic analgesic and sedative.

632
01:03:15,450 --> 01:03:24,120
Now so great work was done by Giant, which records the effects of pain on communities when ingested.

633
01:03:24,540 --> 01:03:32,700
And he recorded that it caused altered visions of haziness and colour alteration and altered the perception and emotional state of subjects.

634
01:03:33,030 --> 01:03:36,420
So it created giddiness and increased motor skills.

635
01:03:36,810 --> 01:03:46,320
Now, this is important because in this regard been was valued in terms of the sacred space it could create within a human consciousness,

636
01:03:47,100 --> 01:03:58,350
an altered vision and reality. So plants as natural objects, defined ritual aspects, not only physically, but also as a metaphysical tool,

637
01:03:58,590 --> 01:04:06,690
a way to bridge boundaries and create visionary space apart from natural reality in essence,

638
01:04:07,260 --> 01:04:13,680
and then has the potential to exist in both the physical and physical spaces simultaneously.

639
01:04:13,890 --> 01:04:20,450
It's a very special planet, so it's anything could be considered magic, in my opinion.

640
01:04:20,460 --> 01:04:25,110
Surely it is this that dimensional travel has always been possible.

641
01:04:25,440 --> 01:04:34,440
It has been since the beginning through plants. I briefly mentioned how early sacred sites of the Neolithic and Bronze Age or misleading coastal plain

642
01:04:34,860 --> 01:04:40,380
appear to have a chameleon like quality in terms of reflecting the natural characteristics of woodland,

643
01:04:40,770 --> 01:04:44,430
maintaining the connection visibly to the landscape.

644
01:04:44,940 --> 01:04:51,790
This is true to the extent of mirror. Natural growth qualities of materials within a construction process.

645
01:04:52,000 --> 01:04:55,060
So the brilliant example in this case is fit east.

646
01:04:55,690 --> 01:05:04,360
And it is not that far from Japan at all. And this site is late in the Olympic to late Bronze Age.

647
01:05:05,140 --> 01:05:14,380
Yes. And it consists of a number of pits which have been surrounded on three sides with hurdle structure, a little bit of a fence.

648
01:05:14,890 --> 01:05:19,780
Now, this fence is structured in a rather normal way, up to a point.

649
01:05:20,260 --> 01:05:28,830
So that staves of oak or of hazel and in between those staves has been woven willer.

650
01:05:29,470 --> 01:05:38,680
And what's really special in this case is that integrated into a number of base construction is integrated into the hurdle itself.

651
01:05:40,150 --> 01:05:48,430
A number of examples of the spiny, really spiny branches of prunus species like blackthorn.

652
01:05:48,790 --> 01:05:54,640
And this has a really visual and tactile effect. Can only theorise as to why they've done this.

653
01:05:55,000 --> 01:05:58,600
But it is important. The intention of the site.

654
01:05:59,050 --> 01:06:02,410
Could it not be overlooked in natural construction?

655
01:06:02,740 --> 01:06:12,150
So message in the choice of materials. The spiny branches of prunus species do not welcome someone to interact with a space

656
01:06:12,850 --> 01:06:18,909
they threaten and are defensive on screens which conceal an inlet into the earth,

657
01:06:18,910 --> 01:06:24,340
a pit. The printed species branches say, do not encroach on this space.

658
01:06:24,670 --> 01:06:32,200
You are not welcome in the visceral visual message or perhaps the prunus species branches.

659
01:06:32,200 --> 01:06:36,520
All camouflage. Blurring artificial lines of the structure.

660
01:06:36,940 --> 01:06:45,759
Mimicking the natural grace of a thicket. This could even potentially be a way of honouring the natural object of diminishing

661
01:06:45,760 --> 01:06:51,370
destruction on the natural landscape caused by the construction itself.

662
01:06:51,730 --> 01:06:55,540
The renationalisation of a space that is still sacred.

663
01:06:56,410 --> 01:07:04,960
The inclusion is certainly not incidental. It is a concerted choice being made to manipulate a very difficult material.

664
01:07:05,500 --> 01:07:12,950
And it's not the only such case of this happening. So they have a number of cremations also within this landscape.

665
01:07:14,240 --> 01:07:17,299
There's something really dynamic about fire, which we can all agree on.

666
01:07:17,300 --> 01:07:25,460
That's and the dynamism of this is reflected in the deposition of cremated materials in the Neolithic in the Bronze Age.

667
01:07:25,940 --> 01:07:30,770
There are so many different ways that cremations are looked after and deposited.

668
01:07:31,730 --> 01:07:33,139
Yet still, in every instance,

669
01:07:33,140 --> 01:07:43,790
there is one commonality which I can find that the deceased individual traverses unknown parts in dust with plant materials selected by communities.

670
01:07:44,450 --> 01:07:48,470
So the mortuary space is obviously primarily occupied by the task.

671
01:07:48,500 --> 01:07:53,990
That's the purpose. But wisdom always of the products of life, often of subsistence.

672
01:07:54,860 --> 01:07:59,599
Obviously, mortuary practices are more reflective of the values of living communities.

673
01:07:59,600 --> 01:08:04,110
Cremation pyres are highly controlled spaces transitory.

674
01:08:04,250 --> 01:08:07,760
Not only in terms of the deceased, but also the attendees.

675
01:08:08,810 --> 01:08:12,730
Another stage of life without the person devalued.

676
01:08:13,430 --> 01:08:17,749
Now there's a number of examples of this, but I've just selected two, so we've got ten.

677
01:08:17,750 --> 01:08:27,500
Craig Wood And that we have various human cremation contained in pits, one pits to one cremation and one individual.

678
01:08:27,800 --> 01:08:37,430
And in some of these, for example, there's hazelnut shell, hawthorn seeds, cleaver seeds, and these are all aspects which are found in the landscape,

679
01:08:37,430 --> 01:08:42,440
aspects which they would have seen every day and would have meant something to these people.

680
01:08:43,310 --> 01:08:49,219
So I also have you should. WEST This one is a bit different because actual military structures were built

681
01:08:49,220 --> 01:08:54,200
and underwent intentional incineration at the same time as the human cremation.

682
01:08:54,620 --> 01:09:04,810
So they were built almost little temples. Now in these examples, stars Byrd, Cherry Stone's Hazelnut Shell and Rowan Seeds.

683
01:09:05,200 --> 01:09:11,140
Not all of these examples are edible in any sense of the word, but they're still included.

684
01:09:11,740 --> 01:09:17,770
That suggests that it's not just subsistence, which motivates the choice of votive offerings in cremation profiles.

685
01:09:18,520 --> 01:09:20,890
Clients had other meaning beyond this.

686
01:09:21,820 --> 01:09:29,920
So there are many cultures in which the curated space of a cremation event aligns physically with a transition into another metaphysical space.

687
01:09:30,820 --> 01:09:36,940
Existence in some aspect continues an existence, not necessarily meaning life.

688
01:09:38,430 --> 01:09:45,750
Existence in all its forms, however, seems to require natural products and subsistence.

689
01:09:46,770 --> 01:09:53,639
Otherwise, these cremation spacious are lines of communication with deceased attendees and somehow a

690
01:09:53,640 --> 01:10:01,620
being whereby plants are very valuable in such a capacity not only as tools of subsistence,

691
01:10:01,860 --> 01:10:07,110
but potentially symbolically, or even as a direct presentation of the landscape.

692
01:10:07,440 --> 01:10:10,079
The environment embodied in natural objects,

693
01:10:10,080 --> 01:10:18,600
a kind of exchange of information between the unknown and unknown, but respected at every stage of existence.

694
01:10:18,630 --> 01:10:26,700
The communities of East Lothian Coastal Plain. There are deep connections between occupied spaces, natural objects and ritualised processes.

695
01:10:27,650 --> 01:10:33,650
Japan knows the epicentre, the linchpin of this network of sites, this network of ritual sites.

696
01:10:34,680 --> 01:10:43,140
And later is the occupation based centre for tasks in the environs is situated on a lack of list,

697
01:10:43,410 --> 01:10:47,370
which is a very unique landform, the volcanic landform.

698
01:10:47,370 --> 01:10:54,060
And it is the highest point for Miles, which again feeds into the visibility theory.

699
01:10:54,400 --> 01:10:58,530
Now, this is evidence of Neolithic activity on the summit.

700
01:10:58,560 --> 01:11:04,950
This is cut and ring and linear and lozenge and Chevron rock markings and rock carvings across the summit.

701
01:11:05,280 --> 01:11:10,590
Some of these were damaged beyond repair in the 1962 quarrying.

702
01:11:11,130 --> 01:11:14,730
Others were incorporated into later Iron Age structures.

703
01:11:14,730 --> 01:11:16,320
And we still find them now.

704
01:11:16,980 --> 01:11:27,420
So this had Japan not had an important role in the ritual landscape of the area during the same period as pancake wood and pancake hill.

705
01:11:28,650 --> 01:11:35,400
So it's not fair. That motive that motivates a choice of place is instead appreciation of the landscape and knowledge of the landscape,

706
01:11:35,820 --> 01:11:39,780
not disconnection, but a brilliant form of connection.

707
01:11:40,200 --> 01:11:51,360
It is just a marshy hole in the ground, but in this marshy holding the ground was an amazing variety of natural objects.

708
01:11:51,660 --> 01:11:57,480
And I did the analysis on these objects. It's mostly in terms of cereals, barley and some wheat.

709
01:11:58,290 --> 01:12:00,059
But this is a significant offering.

710
01:12:00,060 --> 01:12:10,650
If this is indeed a ritual context which I'm leaning towards, it is a significant offering in a landscape which is at its very bones, agricultural.

711
01:12:11,040 --> 01:12:19,140
So even beyond this, if it's not high status, then it's someone giving something which means a lot to them.

712
01:12:19,770 --> 01:12:27,870
Votive offerings are unfortunately often thought of as having to be shiny, and in this case, they're not.

713
01:12:28,200 --> 01:12:38,880
They are natural objects which have value on their own and in terms of subsistence as reflected by the other sites discussed.

714
01:12:39,600 --> 01:12:45,030
But by depositing these objects within the diffused boundaries that conduct our water,

715
01:12:45,210 --> 01:12:49,500
not only are communities providing some form of eternity with a known unknown,

716
01:12:49,500 --> 01:12:55,950
they're communicating then knowledge with the natural context in a tangible, tactile capacity.

717
01:12:56,670 --> 01:13:01,710
Who is listening to these messages? The sending is an uncertainty.

718
01:13:02,190 --> 01:13:10,180
But what is clear is that it mattered to communities that their connection to the natural world understood the natural objects.

719
01:13:10,210 --> 01:13:19,830
Supply communities are indicators of environments as such, when they are associated with ritual contexts and indeed some aspects of magic.

720
01:13:20,370 --> 01:13:27,390
A new meaning emerges in those practices that has long been an act of the so-called primitive communities,

721
01:13:27,720 --> 01:13:34,280
fearing the environmental situation, a negative association or connotation to pain law.

722
01:13:34,320 --> 01:13:38,610
We not only see the inverse of this, but a complex dynamic is revealed.

723
01:13:39,300 --> 01:13:47,480
Japan managed its environmental context in a ritualised capacity and employed symbolic associations with plant remains

724
01:13:47,490 --> 01:13:55,260
and offerings and solution identity of place through plants which may have been used to communicate across boundaries.

725
01:13:55,890 --> 01:13:59,400
I am no closer to a definition of ancient since.

726
01:14:00,550 --> 01:14:07,480
However, I continue to note that these communities have knowledge of natural objects within the very foundations

727
01:14:07,990 --> 01:14:15,460
demonstrated in nearly every action that their partner in subsistence and moving was the natural world.

728
01:14:16,000 --> 01:14:21,610
There was nothing wrong with their site. The Google of their existence is not the natural world.

729
01:14:21,970 --> 01:14:25,510
These were the pioneer naturalists, after all. Thank you.

730
01:14:25,960 --> 01:14:31,330
Thank you very much for presenting what's actually, at this point in the conference,

731
01:14:31,330 --> 01:14:37,060
a fantastic upending of many things that have been perhaps too easily agreed.

732
01:14:37,570 --> 01:14:46,960
We also have with us the thoroughly heroic Laura Glover, who not only works on the rest of the dead of ancient Rome, heroic in itself.

733
01:14:47,230 --> 01:14:51,460
She is a second year Ph.D. student at the University of Exeter,

734
01:14:51,850 --> 01:14:56,770
being supervised by Daniel Ogden, whose work I'm pretty sure is familiar to everyone here.

735
01:14:57,250 --> 01:15:07,390
Her thesis focuses on the night, which as a broad motif in Roman history from the first century BCE to the second century CE.

736
01:15:07,450 --> 01:15:11,710
I now welcome Nora and ask her to begin her presentation.

737
01:15:12,430 --> 01:15:19,089
Hello, everyone. Thank you all for coming. I will examine how Roman poets utilised and support mundane and sometimes well known

738
01:15:19,090 --> 01:15:23,560
contemporary locations to create imagined landscapes for their supernatural tales.

739
01:15:24,220 --> 01:15:28,030
I will also analyse how the character's interactions with these landscapes affect the narrative.

740
01:15:29,290 --> 01:15:36,370
Horace's satire 1.8 creates an interesting interplay between comedy and horror in an imagined version of a well-known graveyard landscape.

741
01:15:37,330 --> 01:15:43,149
Our narrator, a carved statue of the fertility and horticultural God Pre episode details how during the

742
01:15:43,150 --> 01:15:47,979
night he watches the grave stalking terrifying which is an idea is to garner well prepared.

743
01:15:47,980 --> 01:15:49,600
His story is written to be comic.

744
01:15:49,960 --> 01:15:56,140
His description of how these which has used the landscape to undertake their evil practices, creates horror and revulsion in the reader.

745
01:15:56,860 --> 01:16:01,660
Perhaps his monologue is also helpful in detailing how the landscape has been changed over time.

746
01:16:02,140 --> 01:16:08,110
As Rome's Swan Hill has become a sought after area, it is transformed into a place of culture and refinement.

747
01:16:08,140 --> 01:16:10,690
Under Augustus's confidante and Horace's patron,

748
01:16:11,290 --> 01:16:18,270
Aeneas and the old eyesores of the suburban landscape are swallowed up by progress and renovated by the wealthy patron, or,

749
01:16:18,400 --> 01:16:24,070
as his choice of location for his tale of witchcraft makes the story of subverted landscapes and supernatural

750
01:16:24,070 --> 01:16:29,020
happenings all the more interesting as it is a real sight that a contemporary reader would be aware of.

751
01:16:30,070 --> 01:16:34,240
Private business charge my seniors. This Gardens has had its original function altered.

752
01:16:34,690 --> 01:16:39,040
No longer is it a mass grave for slaves and those that cannot afford to do little else

753
01:16:39,040 --> 01:16:43,060
than have friends and loved ones brought here in a cheap box and haphazardly buried.

754
01:16:44,070 --> 01:16:51,750
The narrator describes how this desolate and neglected place of misery, where one was able to gaze at a grim landscape covered with whitened bones,

755
01:16:51,750 --> 01:16:55,350
has become a site of residential homes and leisure for those still living.

756
01:16:56,510 --> 01:17:00,260
Although the landscape may have been transformed from the typical liminal space

757
01:17:00,260 --> 01:17:03,830
in which one might expect shades in the bodies of the dead after nightfall.

758
01:17:04,070 --> 01:17:08,000
This change is reverted by those who desire to use it for its original purpose.

759
01:17:08,720 --> 01:17:09,440
Specifically,

760
01:17:09,830 --> 01:17:17,959
which is use the site to practice evil magic as an idle precipice can only watch unable to escape them or prevent them as those who trouble

761
01:17:17,960 --> 01:17:24,980
human souls with their drugs and incantations call up and are able to torment spirits and collect the bones and herbs needed for the rituals.

762
01:17:26,460 --> 01:17:32,880
They are set to dig down into the soil using only their fingernails, presumably to expose the poorly and humid remains,

763
01:17:33,780 --> 01:17:38,490
porous labourers to create an inhuman and animalistic depiction of the pair, particularly Nadia.

764
01:17:38,760 --> 01:17:42,150
She is described as wandering barefoot through the garden and howling at the moon.

765
01:17:42,810 --> 01:17:48,810
Maybe the most visceral example is how the witches are described as conducting their ritual slaughter to contact the spirits of the dead.

766
01:17:49,380 --> 01:17:54,360
They rip apart a lamb with their teeth in their newly dug trench and let blood trickle down onto the ground.

767
01:17:54,960 --> 01:18:01,830
Despite the pair merely being described as wolf light, this mirrors the sort of hyper ism seen in other great fairy tales of German literature,

768
01:18:02,610 --> 01:18:04,829
particularly one of the tales in Petronius,

769
01:18:04,830 --> 01:18:11,520
a satirical one in which a soldier is said to have gone to a graveyard and turned into a wolf before the eyes of his travelling companion.

770
01:18:11,910 --> 01:18:17,370
While the pair cause less human suffering in this poem, their mastery over the dead through rituals and potions,

771
01:18:17,370 --> 01:18:22,410
forcing spirits from their slumber is very much what we would expect from the witches of Greco-Roman literature.

772
01:18:22,920 --> 01:18:27,810
It is quite interesting that the landscape in which the narrative takes place is merely a horticultural sight.

773
01:18:28,380 --> 01:18:35,070
But through inflicting suffering and impious acts, Nadia can undo its transformation and revert it to a grim and macabre cemetery.

774
01:18:35,820 --> 01:18:39,420
In the end, Krieps is able to comically scare them off out of his garden,

775
01:18:39,450 --> 01:18:44,520
despite his inability to move when the wood he has carved from splits loudly down the buttocks of the statue.

776
01:18:45,700 --> 01:18:51,940
Creating such a resonant sound that the witches scatter. Dropping their false teeth is brilliant too.

777
01:18:51,970 --> 01:18:58,120
Welcome, everyone, to the third day of the magic and the sense of place conference.

778
01:18:58,510 --> 01:19:06,820
Sue Alice Huxley is a doctoral student in her third year at Oxford University at Saint John's College,

779
01:19:07,150 --> 01:19:14,290
researching the relationship between folklore and literature and placed across the 18th and 19th centuries.

780
01:19:14,290 --> 01:19:20,800
And she's going to be talking to us about 18th century fairies in Kensington Gardens before Barry.

781
01:19:21,430 --> 01:19:25,540
So I hand over now to the first panellist Alice Huxley.

782
01:19:25,600 --> 01:19:33,700
Thank you very much for being here. If you walk around the recreational, like in Kensington Garden, a public park in London,

783
01:19:33,850 --> 01:19:37,660
you'll come across this statue of the boy who wouldn't grow up.

784
01:19:38,410 --> 01:19:40,840
J.M. Barrie, the inventor of Peter Pan,

785
01:19:40,900 --> 01:19:47,830
commissioned the statue in arranging for workmen to install it behind awning so that when the awning was taken down,

786
01:19:47,830 --> 01:19:56,889
Peter Pan would appear as if by magic. Today, if people associate Kensington Gardens with fairies, it is likely because of the Peter Pan.

787
01:19:56,890 --> 01:20:04,810
But Barry himself lived in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens and took regular walk through the park with his enormous Saint Bernard.

788
01:20:05,410 --> 01:20:12,160
His first Peter Pan book describes the fairies and other magical creatures who come out to play in Kensington Gardens.

789
01:20:12,250 --> 01:20:18,490
After the gates are locked. Even in the late to Peter Pan novel set predominantly in the Neverland,

790
01:20:18,850 --> 01:20:24,880
Peter Pan tells the Darling Children that he once ran away to Kensington Gardens to live among the fairies.

791
01:20:26,050 --> 01:20:34,420
Barry's fame, both during and after his lifetime, has included earlier works of Barry literature set in Kensington Gardens.

792
01:20:34,870 --> 01:20:41,260
In fact, the site's association with Barry's precedes the invention of Peter Pan by almost two centuries.

793
01:20:41,920 --> 01:20:48,670
This paper situates Barry is the inheritor, not the inventor of the pre-existing mythology of the place.

794
01:20:49,000 --> 01:20:52,300
By turning to the best known depiction of Kensington Fairies.

795
01:20:52,630 --> 01:21:02,050
A 1721 poem by Thomas Tickell. Takeda was a member of the biggest intellectual circle surrounding Joseph Addison,

796
01:21:02,470 --> 01:21:10,390
a group of writers who enjoyed commercial and critical success in their own time but were afterwards relegated to the status of minor poets.

797
01:21:10,900 --> 01:21:17,680
A number of recent scholars, including Abigail Williams, have called for a reassessment of literary output.

798
01:21:18,160 --> 01:21:22,960
Kensington Garden is one such poem which warrants renewed critical attention.

799
01:21:24,150 --> 01:21:33,030
The poem is a mock heroic narrative poem which takes a conventional premise for an essay to provide an origin story for a culturally important place.

800
01:21:33,030 --> 01:21:40,559
So people and parties that convention, by providing an origin story for a limited patch, according to Kells poem,

801
01:21:40,560 --> 01:21:48,120
describes the romantic and political conflicts that cause the downfall of the fairy quote, which supposedly once existed on the site.

802
01:21:48,660 --> 01:21:55,350
To give you a brief overview of the plot, the immortal Fairy Princess Kenna falls in love with Albion, who,

803
01:21:55,350 --> 01:22:03,690
while boasting impressive ancestors, including Neptune, is still mortal, born to a human mother and stolen by the fairies as an infant.

804
01:22:04,410 --> 01:22:11,940
When Kenneth's father, King Oberon, discovers their relationship, he banishes Albion and marries Kenneth with Barry instead.

805
01:22:12,690 --> 01:22:23,549
Albion wages war on Oberon, but dies in the ensuing conflict, prompting Nachi to avenge his death by destroying a bronze to to the end of the poem,

806
01:22:23,550 --> 01:22:29,940
then jump forward to the early 18th century, when McKenna, who is already given her name to Kensington,

807
01:22:30,270 --> 01:22:34,830
inspires the royal gardener, Henry Wise, to construct the sunken terrace.

808
01:22:35,430 --> 01:22:41,190
Wise unconsciously recreates the layout of the fallen fairy city in the design of the garden.

809
01:22:41,820 --> 01:22:47,530
Why fairies and why mockery? So first batteries.

810
01:22:48,140 --> 01:22:55,459
It is unlikely that Tickell was basing his poem on a pre-existing folk tale about the fight, despite the claims of his narrator.

811
01:22:55,460 --> 01:23:03,080
Otherwise, for one thing, the sunken terrace had only existed for about 16 or 17 years by the time it teakettle broke the poem.

812
01:23:03,500 --> 01:23:09,790
And for another, it was possible to boil complex about the very folk you might circulate stories about.

813
01:23:09,800 --> 01:23:15,470
Is it that seems reasonable to assume that Tickhill invented its third tradition?

814
01:23:15,650 --> 01:23:23,719
And I would suggest for political purpose to tell was drawing on a widespread association between royalty and fairies

815
01:23:23,720 --> 01:23:31,160
that spanned both oral and literary traditions that appeared in folktales about fairy kings and queens in the Inchon,

816
01:23:31,160 --> 01:23:37,110
tresses of Medieval Romance and an early modern text such as Edmund Spenser's, The Faerie Queene.

817
01:23:37,850 --> 01:23:42,170
Cycle adapted this fictional convention to flatter the Barbarian Monarchy.

818
01:23:42,680 --> 01:23:48,260
He was at the heart of a Whig establishment that had been broadly supportive of George the best claim to the throne,

819
01:23:48,530 --> 01:23:55,909
and he had already written several poems championing The Canterbury Fools by giving them the fairy treatment and Kensington Garden.

820
01:23:55,910 --> 01:24:03,080
It was thus situating them in a British landscape and cultural tradition at a time when their detractors view them as foreign interlopers.

821
01:24:03,740 --> 01:24:08,870
This poem about Kensington Garden seems to flatter one mysterious member of the court.

822
01:24:08,870 --> 01:24:13,309
In particular. It opens not in the ancient days of the Faerie City,

823
01:24:13,310 --> 01:24:20,600
but in the 18th century present with a description of the fashionable promenades that became a renowned feature of the garden during the period.

824
01:24:21,350 --> 01:24:29,090
Six lines are devoted to a complimentary portrayal of one parading noblewoman introduced as England's daughter darling of the land.

825
01:24:29,840 --> 01:24:38,810
So when I first set out to identify this anonymous figure, I had five main criteria based on a textual evidence of the poem.

826
01:24:39,560 --> 01:24:44,720
Firstly, and most obviously, the noblewoman must have participated in the Promenades Arts.

827
01:24:45,320 --> 01:24:49,910
Secondly, she must fit the description of England's metaphorical parents.

828
01:24:50,540 --> 01:24:55,580
Thirdly, she must be notably tall, as she's described, towering over her companions.

829
01:24:56,270 --> 01:25:03,110
Fourthly, there must be a plausible reason for how to write about her in the political context of 1721.

830
01:25:03,710 --> 01:25:08,200
And finally, she should ideally have some relevance to the wider subject.

831
01:25:08,270 --> 01:25:13,980
The poem. So here are the most likely contenders from the royal court.

832
01:25:15,030 --> 01:25:19,530
George, the first daughter by his ex-wife, was Sophia Dorothea of Hanover.

833
01:25:20,250 --> 01:25:27,610
Sophia was notably tall, fulfilling the third criteria, but she spent little time in England, let alone Kensington Palace.

834
01:25:27,780 --> 01:25:34,999
We can discounter adequately. The Victorian man of letters, Lea Hunt, instead took the poem as alluding to George,

835
01:25:35,000 --> 01:25:40,280
the first daughter in North Carolina, whom he credited with initiating the promenades.

836
01:25:40,820 --> 01:25:45,590
Caroline Beck will meet the first criteria and possibly also the fourth criteria,

837
01:25:45,770 --> 01:25:50,510
as she had recently brought about a reconciliation between George the first and George Augustus.

838
01:25:51,170 --> 01:25:52,069
On the other hand,

839
01:25:52,070 --> 01:26:00,830
the reconciliation had been transparently halfhearted and to Celts perhaps unlikely to write a flattering poem about Caroline in the 1720s,

840
01:26:01,040 --> 01:26:05,779
after five or six years of an uneasy relationship with the King George,

841
01:26:05,780 --> 01:26:10,130
the first was supposedly in the habit of calling her the devil, Madam Princess.

842
01:26:11,210 --> 01:26:14,900
We can also take George the Fest's other daughters out of contention,

843
01:26:14,900 --> 01:26:21,260
even though they participated in the Kensington Promenades while George the best, lived openly with his mistress.

844
01:26:21,290 --> 01:26:25,519
Now you've seen Wanda shooting in bed that children would not acknowledge as legitimate

845
01:26:25,520 --> 01:26:29,150
for fear of overstepping the amount of controversy which the public would tolerate.

846
01:26:29,570 --> 01:26:33,080
Instead, the three daughters were presented as Medici's nieces.

847
01:26:33,320 --> 01:26:36,830
So it's unlikely that two wrote about any one of them in particular.

848
01:26:38,590 --> 01:26:44,980
I would therefore like to put forward George the best distressed, seen as an alternative, very thin, anonymous noblewoman.

849
01:26:45,520 --> 01:26:52,300
This reading requires a different but textually supported interpretation of England's daughter as simply the country's darling.

850
01:26:53,050 --> 01:26:55,450
She undoubtedly fulfils the best criteria.

851
01:26:55,540 --> 01:27:01,850
She resided in Kensington Palace and participates in the promenades while she was so renowned for her extraordinary height.

852
01:27:01,870 --> 01:27:05,320
The nickname among the English population was the maypole.

853
01:27:06,160 --> 01:27:11,290
Melusine also meets the fourth criteria to count as a supporter of the Hanoverian

854
01:27:11,290 --> 01:27:15,150
monarchy and a compelling reason for betraying her in a flattering light.

855
01:27:15,160 --> 01:27:24,040
In the early 1720s, her public image was in dire need of repair, while some members of the English state public sector terrorists,

856
01:27:24,040 --> 01:27:28,180
the de facto queen, had detractors criticised her sharply in the press,

857
01:27:28,750 --> 01:27:36,190
a commentary often exacerbated by a combination of age, sexist and xenophobic prejudices not merely seen as old,

858
01:27:36,190 --> 01:27:40,930
unattractive and greedy as a parasite who'd come to drain the country's coffers.

859
01:27:41,530 --> 01:27:47,290
Some complained that she wielded too much power as an unofficial mediator between petitioners and the king.

860
01:27:47,800 --> 01:27:55,150
Others criticised her involvement in the South Sea Company, the collapse of which in 1720 caused a financial crash in Britain.

861
01:27:56,700 --> 01:28:00,239
Tacos poem can therefore be read as a proof of fairness.

862
01:28:00,240 --> 01:28:04,320
A The flexible access aspects of the public image debate.

863
01:28:04,380 --> 01:28:11,670
It provides a reputation while delicately minimising a perceived power, presenting her outside in the gardens,

864
01:28:11,670 --> 01:28:16,950
participating in a frivolous promenade instead of manipulating the chains behind closed doors.

865
01:28:17,970 --> 01:28:20,580
She might explain the varied subject of the poem.

866
01:28:20,710 --> 01:28:28,280
She shares the name with one of the aristocratic, alluring fairies of European folklore and the medieval prose romance scene.

867
01:28:28,320 --> 01:28:33,000
The titular character is cast to transform into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.

868
01:28:33,570 --> 01:28:36,990
She marries on the condition that her husband will never see her on a Saturday.

869
01:28:37,050 --> 01:28:41,160
But after years of marriage, he breaks his promise and appears through the keyhole.

870
01:28:41,160 --> 01:28:46,020
While she bends the betrayed Melusine transforms into a dragon and flies away.

871
01:28:46,920 --> 01:28:52,650
This supernatural figure might seem like a strange namesake for members of the early modern nobility.

872
01:28:53,070 --> 01:28:57,030
However, Melusine is never just a monster in the romance text.

873
01:28:57,090 --> 01:29:01,169
She is devoted, capable and inserted into real world genealogies.

874
01:29:01,170 --> 01:29:06,500
Is the founding matriarch of the house of Luce in a house that rules various principalities in Europe.

875
01:29:06,510 --> 01:29:08,760
And that happened during the late medieval period.

876
01:29:09,420 --> 01:29:16,290
George, the first mistress, was probably named Medici because the monarchy was associated with dynastic power as well as magic.

877
01:29:17,510 --> 01:29:23,660
In the poem, Kenna's undying devotion to Albion can be read as a sympathetic commentary on Maliki's relationship,

878
01:29:23,870 --> 01:29:30,020
both to George the First and to the nation at large. Albion is, of course, also an ancient name for Britain.

879
01:29:30,590 --> 01:29:38,299
There's a discrepancy between the story and the reality of the garden early on in Kensington Garden,

880
01:29:38,300 --> 01:29:43,280
to give a misleading impression that is buried authentically derives from the British tradition.

881
01:29:43,490 --> 01:29:52,610
By ascribing them the expected characteristics, they dance from sunlight, still human children and for more domestic cleanliness, the silver coins.

882
01:29:53,300 --> 01:29:58,410
As the plot unfolds, however, his fairies are not engaged in the more traditional activities of.

883
01:29:59,060 --> 01:30:04,760
When fairies variously reward, trick or punish human beings, sometimes helping them in domestic tasks,

884
01:30:04,850 --> 01:30:12,829
sometimes leading them into Barry Hills to participate in the kind of sweeping conflict found in classical epic Tokyo draws

885
01:30:12,830 --> 01:30:19,969
attention to the incongruity between their size and behaviour by arming them with humorously small weapons that burn spears,

886
01:30:19,970 --> 01:30:22,460
for instance, resemble rows of needles.

887
01:30:24,030 --> 01:30:32,310
Finally, instead of seamlessly combining English diaries and classical deities in the same work to help find humour in their jarring interactions.

888
01:30:32,940 --> 01:30:39,360
Despite what the name suggests, 18th century Wilderness Gardens were not designed to look like wild natural spaces,

889
01:30:39,570 --> 01:30:44,130
but to demonstrate the designer's ability to contain nature within hedges and zones.

890
01:30:44,340 --> 01:30:49,920
Creating sheltered walkways where visitors could lose themselves in intellectual and personal contemplation.

891
01:30:50,400 --> 01:30:53,850
Kensington Garden is a little remembered work of literature today.

892
01:30:54,600 --> 01:30:59,250
Nevertheless, it proved surprisingly influential over the 18th and 19th centuries,

893
01:30:59,430 --> 01:31:04,770
reprinted in multiple volumes over the period, as well as in collections of 2000 work.

894
01:31:05,370 --> 01:31:12,419
A number of Victorian local historians keen to ascribe a mythical back story to Kensington, repeated the claim that its name,

895
01:31:12,420 --> 01:31:17,819
derived from a fairy princess called Canna their readers to sit in Kensington

896
01:31:17,820 --> 01:31:21,960
Gardens and enchant their surroundings by reimagining two palace fairies,

897
01:31:22,470 --> 01:31:32,280
all with brown princeton sprouts. We would ask our readers to step in, take a comfortable seat, say in the flower walk and closing their eyes,

898
01:31:32,280 --> 01:31:38,880
allow themselves to drift backwards, backwards to that remote period when fairies gambles on the silence.

899
01:31:39,300 --> 01:31:44,310
A golden age when all men were brave and honest and all women fair and true.

900
01:31:44,910 --> 01:31:53,490
A little to the north of where the palace now stands rose the dazzling domes and towers of the proud palace, the elfin king Oberon,

901
01:31:53,850 --> 01:32:02,340
and clustering around the dwelling place of their monarch with a crowded streets and glittering spires of the capital of the fairy empire.

902
01:32:03,330 --> 01:32:09,630
As late as 1983, a new comic opera based on a poem opened at the Savoy Theatre,

903
01:32:09,960 --> 01:32:16,890
demonstrating that it continued to have a cultural afterlife in the period when J.M. Barrie was writing his Peter Pan works.

904
01:32:18,410 --> 01:32:22,760
Frustratingly, we don't know for certain whether Barry had to come in.

905
01:32:23,450 --> 01:32:31,159
If not, it still seems possible that he picked up on a cultural association between Barry's and Kenton's Gardens that persisted through 18th,

906
01:32:31,160 --> 01:32:38,360
19th and 20th century riffs onto Cal's work shortly after the publication of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

907
01:32:38,440 --> 01:32:45,050
A contributor to notes and queries group Tickle and Barry together as the Mythologised Barry Bonds of Kensington.

908
01:32:46,030 --> 01:32:53,380
This story has broader implications for the ways in which we understand the relationship between real and imagined histories of place.

909
01:32:53,830 --> 01:33:03,340
The physical characteristics of the Paris Informed 2002 mythology and the ensuing theory tradition changed the built environment of the public park.

910
01:33:03,880 --> 01:33:11,050
Visitors today can see the Peter Pan statue play in the Peter Pan themed playground on the cut out an oak installation,

911
01:33:11,410 --> 01:33:15,100
a car tree stump decorated with barriers and woodland creatures.

912
01:33:15,700 --> 01:33:22,480
These complicated interactions between tangible and intangible heritage encourage us to look beyond disciplinary boundaries,

913
01:33:22,720 --> 01:33:27,730
not just between periods of time, but between literature, folklore, art, history and geography.

914
01:33:28,300 --> 01:33:31,540
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much.

915
01:33:31,720 --> 01:33:36,610
I think a whole new world said to me and I think I probably speak for everyone.

916
01:33:36,820 --> 01:33:44,740
Now we're going to hear from Tom Bullock. Todd Bullock is senior lecturer in Renaissance drama at the University of Huddersfield.

917
01:33:45,160 --> 01:33:50,590
His research interests include Shakespeare and the pre-history of environmentalism,

918
01:33:50,980 --> 01:33:56,050
magic and Science, Repertory and performance studies and Global Shakespeare.

919
01:33:56,390 --> 01:34:00,730
He's the author of Eco Criticism and Early Modern English Literature,

920
01:34:00,940 --> 01:34:09,880
Green Pastures and Literature and Nature in the Renaissance and Eco Critical and Theology, as well as over a dozen articles in journals.

921
01:34:11,110 --> 01:34:18,770
All right. Thank you, Diane. So my paper today is on the Witch of Edmonton, one of the great Jacobean witchcraft plays.

922
01:34:19,910 --> 01:34:22,910
And I'm going to focus on it as a play about wetlands.

923
01:34:23,660 --> 01:34:28,310
Wetlands have long been a bastion of magical beliefs.

924
01:34:28,940 --> 01:34:37,249
Anyone who caught Alexandra and Diane's paper yesterday will not need much convincing that a whiff of the supernatural clippings about these places,

925
01:34:37,250 --> 01:34:39,530
as surely as the pungent stench of stagnant water.

926
01:34:40,190 --> 01:34:46,970
But back in the Anglo-Saxon era, the author of Beowulf tars Grendel's mother as a mere cliff or torn hag.

927
01:34:47,690 --> 01:34:53,930
While the night entry hagiography of Saint Pathak recounts his battles with misshapen bin dwelling demons.

928
01:34:55,150 --> 01:34:56,400
And Tales of here at the Wake.

929
01:34:56,640 --> 01:35:02,220
The Normans employ a local cunning woman known as the witch Brandon, to preach out curses against the English rebels hiding out in the fence.

930
01:35:03,060 --> 01:35:08,400
And in the Jacobean period, the weird sisters help broth includes the fillets of a funny snake.

931
01:35:08,490 --> 01:35:13,440
And of course, Caliban conjures infections from the fans to blast Prospero.

932
01:35:14,820 --> 01:35:17,910
In a 6019 protest ballad entitled The Police Complaint,

933
01:35:18,240 --> 01:35:24,300
the author calls upon all this Neptune in the moon to curse the developers that seek to drain and enclose the wetlands.

934
01:35:25,310 --> 01:35:29,120
Meanwhile on the continent, the Punchline Martius in Italy at the foot of Mount Cicero,

935
01:35:29,120 --> 01:35:32,960
have long been linked with a sorceress thirsty for Bacchus antiquity.

936
01:35:34,240 --> 01:35:40,270
It's easy to fathom why magical beliefs would prove particularly pernicious in these sparsely populated backwaters.

937
01:35:40,870 --> 01:35:43,330
Not only were schools and churches few and far between,

938
01:35:43,720 --> 01:35:50,500
but rituals involving sympathetic magic would satisfy a deep yearning to exert some control over an unstable environment prone to flooding.

939
01:35:51,660 --> 01:35:56,340
Moreover, diseases afflicting humans and cattle are commonplace and the absence of germ theory.

940
01:35:56,340 --> 01:36:02,670
Finland communities desperate to find a scapegoat would be easily tempted to attribute an otherwise inexplicable outbreak to witchcraft.

941
01:36:03,790 --> 01:36:09,639
Now medical minded historians have proffered dozens of ingenious explanations for witchcraft and attempts that often

942
01:36:09,640 --> 01:36:15,310
betray the incapacity of the scientific mind to comprehend why the widespread faith in magic in pre-modern societies.

943
01:36:16,120 --> 01:36:20,500
Confessions of witchcraft, if not extracted under torture, must have been often assumed,

944
01:36:20,830 --> 01:36:29,320
prompted by some psychotic episode brought on by ergot fungus poisoning, syphilis, Huntington's disease, Lyme disease, dementia, etc.

945
01:36:29,980 --> 01:36:32,920
Now, it's not the intent of this paper today to propose a reductive,

946
01:36:32,920 --> 01:36:39,159
magic bullet explanation to debunk a phenomenon that's linked with a vast complex of socio cultural forces,

947
01:36:39,160 --> 01:36:47,309
spiritual traditions and environmental factors. But if we turn from mythical and universal explanations of witchcraft to ask why it thrived

948
01:36:47,310 --> 01:36:51,480
in particular locales and the prevalence of magic in wetlands doesn't hurt further inquiry.

949
01:36:52,410 --> 01:36:58,410
Modern appreciation of wetlands has developed in the absence of a serious, often fatal disease that they want spawned.

950
01:36:59,610 --> 01:37:04,520
While malaria disappeared from the UK around the end of the First World War and it's now classed as an imported disease.

951
01:37:04,530 --> 01:37:09,180
It was once endemic in low lying areas along fens, marshes and estuaries.

952
01:37:10,020 --> 01:37:14,370
The reason we still seldom think of it in early modern England is that the mosquito a Spanish

953
01:37:14,370 --> 01:37:19,800
loan word first recorded in 1572 and only gradually adopted masqueraded as the fly or nets.

954
01:37:20,490 --> 01:37:27,090
While the word malaria borrowed from the Italian in 1740 was disguised under the term ague.

955
01:37:28,020 --> 01:37:30,180
The Ague could refer to any fever in general.

956
01:37:30,600 --> 01:37:37,889
But descriptions of Persian or cotton fevers, which flare up every third or fourth day, occur frequently in early modern texts.

957
01:37:37,890 --> 01:37:46,410
And they correspond exactly with the symptoms of Plasmodium vivax, a fever every other day, and Plasmodium malaria, a fever every 72 hours.

958
01:37:47,550 --> 01:37:52,470
William Harvey, the esteemed physician, suffered from malaria, as did Samuel peeps.

959
01:37:52,470 --> 01:37:59,310
And Oliver Cromwell contracted these Persian fevers. Daniel Defoe left a very colourful account of its virulence in the Essex marshes.

960
01:38:00,710 --> 01:38:05,570
Precise epidemiological data is, of course, hard to come by for the early modern era.

961
01:38:05,570 --> 01:38:12,200
But parish records indicate considerably higher rates of mortality near Marsh's favoured breeding

962
01:38:12,200 --> 01:38:17,180
grounds of the NFL is after a part of us that no mosquito capable of transmitting malaria.

963
01:38:18,500 --> 01:38:23,450
But as its etymology suggests, early moderns blamed malaria on bad air.

964
01:38:23,990 --> 01:38:26,980
But as far back as 1666, the physician, Thomas Sydenham,

965
01:38:26,990 --> 01:38:32,840
wrote a detailed study on Persian fevers and drew a correlation between outbreaks and spikes in insect populations.

966
01:38:33,350 --> 01:38:40,130
When insects form extraordinarily, then egg use and contains up here early about midsummer and the autumn proves very quickly.

967
01:38:40,760 --> 01:38:45,410
Most people prior to 1666, however, assumed that darker forces were at work.

968
01:38:46,100 --> 01:38:50,749
It's probably not coincidental that areas with extensive wetlands, such as the Fens, Essex, Kent,

969
01:38:50,750 --> 01:38:55,760
Somerset and the Ribble Valley in Lancashire witnessed disproportionately large numbers of witchcraft trials.

970
01:38:56,970 --> 01:38:57,720
Is it possible?

971
01:38:57,720 --> 01:39:04,200
I'm just going to throw this out there and see if anyone else finds this at all convincing that in addition to large moles or supernumerary nipples,

972
01:39:04,200 --> 01:39:08,459
that the swellings caused by mosquito bites might in some cases have been mistaken for

973
01:39:08,460 --> 01:39:13,260
the infamous witch's teat in which they allegedly suckled their familiars with blood.

974
01:39:14,460 --> 01:39:20,400
The connection between wetlands, malaria and witchcraft offers a fresh angle in which to view the wish of Edmondson.

975
01:39:21,150 --> 01:39:24,660
A good deal of commentary on this could be in place to determine whether it debunks

976
01:39:24,660 --> 01:39:30,130
witchcraft and decries Sawyer's execution or gleefully exploits her grisly fate,

977
01:39:30,180 --> 01:39:33,810
birth entertainment value and colludes with misogyny and ageism.

978
01:39:35,120 --> 01:39:38,810
Another strand of scholarship focuses on the gender politics of the domestic tragedy,

979
01:39:39,170 --> 01:39:45,049
often attempting to clarify the linkages between the three plotlines focussed on respectively the bigamist Frank Thorney,

980
01:39:45,050 --> 01:39:48,250
the Witch Mother Sawyer and the clown Cody Banks.

981
01:39:49,670 --> 01:39:53,360
Little attention has been paid to the place. Environmental context.

982
01:39:54,350 --> 01:40:00,840
17th century Edmonton stood alongside substantial wetlands over a half mile wide on the Western Bank of the River Lee.

983
01:40:01,610 --> 01:40:06,200
A number of wetlands still in Girdle Edmonton to this day. Ramsey Marsh and Waltham O.

984
01:40:06,230 --> 01:40:11,030
Marsh spread out along its northern edges and Tottenham and Hackney Marshes lie to its south.

985
01:40:11,950 --> 01:40:15,429
The only reason we have forgotten about Edmondson Marsh is that much of it was

986
01:40:15,430 --> 01:40:20,710
obliterated by the construction of a series of reservoirs in the early 20th century.

987
01:40:22,570 --> 01:40:24,190
Jacoby in Edmonton, however,

988
01:40:24,190 --> 01:40:31,630
was hugged by marshlands on its east and it was reticulated by a number of tributaries of the LEA that oozed through it from the West.

989
01:40:32,440 --> 01:40:36,610
Mother Sawyer resided near winch more hill on the western fringe of Edmonton,

990
01:40:37,000 --> 01:40:41,050
putting her in the vicinity of two such tributaries which I've shown here with the Blue Arrows,

991
01:40:41,920 --> 01:40:50,500
a Simons Brook to the north and more brook to itself through the tendency of water to stagnant and slow flowing watercourses.

992
01:40:50,830 --> 01:40:54,550
The severely polluted Moore Brook was converted and buried in the 1950s,

993
01:40:54,820 --> 01:41:00,910
but in the early 17th century it was essentially an open sewer and an ideal habitat for malaria breeding mosquitoes.

994
01:41:02,020 --> 01:41:03,819
Dean. In the light of environmental history,

995
01:41:03,820 --> 01:41:10,990
it seems revealing that the Witch of Edmonds and Associates Mother Sawyer with dirty foul water in her first appearance in the play.

996
01:41:11,770 --> 01:41:17,590
Just because she happens to be poor, deformed and ignorant, complains the people of Edmonds and malign her as a witch.

997
01:41:18,280 --> 01:41:23,680
Must I for that be made a common sink for all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues to fall and run into?

998
01:41:25,860 --> 01:41:33,540
The striking comparison of Sawyer to a sink could refer to a pool or pit formed in the ground for collecting waste water or sewage.

999
01:41:34,410 --> 01:41:38,100
The metaphor may have been suggested by the near homophones of Sawyer and Sewer,

1000
01:41:38,610 --> 01:41:44,670
but she complicates this by tracing the source of filth back to the community, back to her slanderous accusers.

1001
01:41:44,940 --> 01:41:48,300
If the common sink is unsanitary, it's because the people have befouled it.

1002
01:41:49,790 --> 01:41:51,440
By the same token, if she is a witch,

1003
01:41:51,650 --> 01:41:56,570
the townsfolk have driven her to it by their constant recrimination because all one to be a witch must be counted.

1004
01:41:56,570 --> 01:42:03,400
One, she says. Now. Sink could also signify a low lying area where the flowing water collects and forms.

1005
01:42:03,430 --> 01:42:09,760
It could be a marsh, a pool, a wetlands. Meaning that dates back to 1594, according to the OED.

1006
01:42:10,850 --> 01:42:11,989
Whichever reading we prefer.

1007
01:42:11,990 --> 01:42:18,860
The speech frames the presence of the witch in the community as analogous to an unhealthy cesspool or marsh afflicting the people with disease.

1008
01:42:20,140 --> 01:42:27,730
They claim that she or speaks her cattle or speaks their cattle for which the corn themselves, their servants and their babies.

1009
01:42:27,730 --> 01:42:32,799
That nurse. I'm sorry. I got of. An insightful reading of the play.

1010
01:42:32,800 --> 01:42:40,000
In the opening monologue, Mary Ford Wilson remarks that it helps cast the witch as the most visibly identifiable source of contagion in the community.

1011
01:42:41,040 --> 01:42:49,670
What would Wilson think as a reference to the sinful womb and never considers what sicknesses might have been endemic in Edmonton in 1620?

1012
01:42:50,560 --> 01:42:53,950
Don Fisher similarly reflects upon the play a sense of a correspondence between

1013
01:42:53,950 --> 01:42:58,510
dirty water and women's bodies supposedly tainted by inspiration in childbirth.

1014
01:42:59,570 --> 01:43:03,299
Revisiting this witchcraft play with an invite with an eye on environmental history

1015
01:43:03,300 --> 01:43:07,879
is a place one could add that it intensifies another literal source of contagion

1016
01:43:07,880 --> 01:43:11,600
in stagnant and polluted wetlands and watercourses that actually stood alongside

1017
01:43:11,600 --> 01:43:14,990
Edmundson in the 17th century and would have been an incubator for malaria.

1018
01:43:16,400 --> 01:43:20,809
Now the parish records of All Saints Edmondson, now in the London Metropolitan Archive,

1019
01:43:20,810 --> 01:43:27,380
do not record causes of death, but archival evidence confirms that AGU was present there in the early 17th century.

1020
01:43:28,100 --> 01:43:33,800
Don Clark, in his Trumpet of Apollo, touts his ague remedies and directs readers to persons who can vouch for their efficacy.

1021
01:43:34,250 --> 01:43:40,790
Observing that Mistress lead dwelling with Mistress Brett and her mother at Edmonton, having had a double contained a long time, was cured.

1022
01:43:41,990 --> 01:43:47,480
In areas where marsh fever was rife, many would have turned to quacks over the folk remedies peddled by wise women or cunning men.

1023
01:43:48,730 --> 01:43:55,350
But those who had lost loved ones or precious cattle might blame vulnerable, disreputable people on the social margins for having cursed them.

1024
01:43:56,740 --> 01:44:04,390
Is therefore ironic as well as tragic that Elizabeth Sawyer herself would have known this grief, this loss all too well.

1025
01:44:04,900 --> 01:44:11,440
I discovered, to my shock in the archives last week of her 11 children, six of them died in infancy.

1026
01:44:12,650 --> 01:44:16,910
The daughter named after her died upon Christmas 1597 at the age of one.

1027
01:44:17,330 --> 01:44:22,010
The following May a boy, Ambrose, did not live through his first day in 1602.

1028
01:44:22,100 --> 01:44:28,370
This is the year again that reports an AGU in Edmonton or suffers a unspeakable series of losses.

1029
01:44:28,640 --> 01:44:32,540
Her two year old son, William, and two day old daughter Joanna.

1030
01:44:32,810 --> 01:44:38,780
Both die on the same day, April 9th. Six weeks later, Joanna's twin sister, Mary, died.

1031
01:44:40,170 --> 01:44:46,920
Well, I was almost crying in the archives. A number of factors such as that malnourishment could have contributed to these premature deaths.

1032
01:44:47,520 --> 01:44:51,660
But three and two months in the same household smacks of a transmissible disease,

1033
01:44:52,110 --> 01:44:58,590
and the presence of marshes and polluted water around Edmonton points to a disease that's water borne or carried by water breeding insects.

1034
01:44:59,100 --> 01:45:02,460
Many adults recover from malaria, but the young do not fare so well.

1035
01:45:02,490 --> 01:45:09,710
Malaria is known to trigger a devastating uptick in infant and child mortality, and infections during pregnancy often result in stillbirth.

1036
01:45:10,830 --> 01:45:15,569
The inhabitants of Jacobean London were well aware of the health risks posed by clogged urban waterways,

1037
01:45:15,570 --> 01:45:22,379
as attested by the writings of Thomas Decker, to whom scholars attribute the mother story of scenes in the play and the seven Deadly Sins of London.

1038
01:45:22,380 --> 01:45:25,500
Dekker observes that standing water does nothing but gather corruption.

1039
01:45:26,280 --> 01:45:33,329
News from Gravesend, co-written with Thomas Middleton, blames plague on bad air sucked from stand in pools from bogs from rank in Derbyshire

1040
01:45:33,330 --> 01:45:38,460
Fens solve this problem and supply a rapidly expanding London with clean water.

1041
01:45:38,850 --> 01:45:44,250
The authorities had launched an ambitious hydro engineering project in the first decade of King James reign.

1042
01:45:44,910 --> 01:45:48,629
The New River, which piped fresh water for amble springs near where to?

1043
01:45:48,630 --> 01:45:54,360
The conduit, working well in north London. And this was delved through the western edge of Edmonton.

1044
01:45:55,050 --> 01:45:59,220
The project was spearheaded by mining baron Hugh Middleton, supported by King James,

1045
01:45:59,220 --> 01:46:03,990
but encountered fierce opposition from local landowners who feared that diverting channels through

1046
01:46:03,990 --> 01:46:07,770
their farmland would create quagmires that might drown cattle and of course spread disease.

1047
01:46:09,120 --> 01:46:12,779
Despite these qualms, the New River was completed in 16, 13 and six years later,

1048
01:46:12,780 --> 01:46:19,370
the New River Company was incorporated by a royal charter, which makes it a criminal offence to dump rubbish into the river.

1049
01:46:20,550 --> 01:46:27,930
Passage of this act suggests that pollution was a recognised problem in the New River in 1619, shortly before Sawyer was convicted.

1050
01:46:28,530 --> 01:46:33,149
It invites us to interpret her persecution of the ritual cleansing of a befouled waterway,

1051
01:46:33,150 --> 01:46:37,379
or think it's therefore striking that the New River was cut right through when more hill,

1052
01:46:37,380 --> 01:46:43,350
the western flank of Edmundson, where Sawyer resided, introducing more water into an already sodden, flood prone area.

1053
01:46:44,610 --> 01:46:46,200
When the Witch of Edmonton was first staged,

1054
01:46:46,200 --> 01:46:50,160
the community at the apex would have been anxious about outsiders interfering with the white ones in their midst.

1055
01:46:50,610 --> 01:46:53,969
While Londoners were increasingly conscious of the reliance upon the northern suburbs

1056
01:46:53,970 --> 01:46:58,230
for clean water and would have been concerned by reports of outbreaks of witchcraft,

1057
01:46:58,530 --> 01:47:03,180
of disease or witchcraft conjured diseases in places upstream such as Edmonton.

1058
01:47:04,450 --> 01:47:09,120
Interestingly, Mother's story is not the only person compared to putrid water in the play before.

1059
01:47:09,130 --> 01:47:13,270
It's another transcript. Analogy between bodies and what one's in the bigamy plot.

1060
01:47:13,300 --> 01:47:16,930
When Frank Naughty exclaims, presumably while pounding on his chest.

1061
01:47:17,320 --> 01:47:23,260
Or Here, here is the thin when which this hydra of discontent grows rank occurring in the very next scene,

1062
01:47:23,260 --> 01:47:29,530
after Sawyer's comparison of herself to a polluted think, the motive of filthy water serves to bind together the plotlines.

1063
01:47:30,870 --> 01:47:35,009
The domestic tragedy plot in which Frank Thorne is compelled to marry Susan to secure a dowry.

1064
01:47:35,010 --> 01:47:41,160
Despite having already wed, Winifred exposes the pervasive greed of the middle classes depicted in the play.

1065
01:47:41,490 --> 01:47:46,830
More precisely, it's the cash strapped Gentry's greed for land of the acres owned by the yeoman

1066
01:47:46,830 --> 01:47:50,580
farmer Carter that pressures Thorney to obey his father and marry Carter's daughter.

1067
01:47:51,390 --> 01:47:57,810
The fame, hunger for land and her 17th century is driving the reclamation projects to drain and destroy the wetlands.

1068
01:47:58,320 --> 01:48:00,809
The allusion here to learning Hydra may be classical,

1069
01:48:00,810 --> 01:48:07,350
but these ominous references to wetlands as monstrous spaces conspire with these efforts to drain and enclose the wetlands.

1070
01:48:08,070 --> 01:48:14,280
It is therefore somewhat curious that Sawyer's most bitter enemy in the play is a man named Banks.

1071
01:48:14,850 --> 01:48:16,890
No person of that name appears in the play.

1072
01:48:16,920 --> 01:48:24,450
Source The wonderful discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer by assigning her nemesis the name banks with its connotations of embankments.

1073
01:48:24,840 --> 01:48:29,340
The playwright's famous conflict between them, not only in terms of rich versus poor and men versus women,

1074
01:48:29,850 --> 01:48:32,910
also is an elemental struggle between drylands and wetlands.

1075
01:48:33,740 --> 01:48:40,610
Giving the aspects of a fitful environmental allegory. And so your first scene banks confronts her and accuses her of trespassing.

1076
01:48:40,850 --> 01:48:46,280
What makes, though upon my ground so explained, she's gathering a few rotten sticks to warm me.

1077
01:48:46,730 --> 01:48:50,060
An exchange that captures the stark realities of early modern fuel poverty.

1078
01:48:51,110 --> 01:48:54,769
But the uncharitable banks drives away the old woman who has just been compared

1079
01:48:54,770 --> 01:48:58,520
to dirty water with verbal and physical violence hanging out of my ground.

1080
01:48:59,360 --> 01:49:05,600
The word ground appears a third time when Stoya declares banks is the ground of all my scandal.

1081
01:49:06,260 --> 01:49:10,970
And in the ensuing scene during his outburst about the fin within him is prompted by Susan's

1082
01:49:11,330 --> 01:49:16,670
innocent request to know the ground of his disturbance or the deliberately or subconsciously.

1083
01:49:16,670 --> 01:49:20,540
The play draws a recurrent contrast between dry ground versus watery commons,

1084
01:49:20,930 --> 01:49:25,040
associating the latter with a guilt stricken bigamist and a curse in which.

1085
01:49:26,270 --> 01:49:31,009
The belief that marshes might be controlled through magical incantations is voiced in another

1086
01:49:31,010 --> 01:49:36,049
place set in Edmonton and titled The Merry Devil of Edmonton features a titular magus,

1087
01:49:36,050 --> 01:49:39,140
Peter Fable, who boasts he could conjure a flutter along the river.

1088
01:49:39,140 --> 01:49:43,550
Lea Well, first hand in field and such rings of mist has never rose from any Derbyshire stand.

1089
01:49:43,730 --> 01:49:47,630
I'll make the buried seed arise wherein drown the marshes under the bridge.

1090
01:49:48,940 --> 01:49:53,139
Beecher envisions brackish water surging southward from where in Hertfordshire,

1091
01:49:53,140 --> 01:49:56,890
towards north London to the marshes here would include those in and around Edmondson.

1092
01:49:57,820 --> 01:50:03,100
Amidst the floods, we're blamed for disease outbreaks. Speech has decidedly sinister overtones.

1093
01:50:03,670 --> 01:50:08,170
This, beyond the lost of a few twigs, is the situation that the paranoid banks is trying to prevent.

1094
01:50:08,530 --> 01:50:14,440
When he expels soya from his ground, behaving like actual banks constructed to hold back the creeks and marsh.

1095
01:50:15,370 --> 01:50:20,350
Although Sawyer never conjures a flood per say, she does manage to temporarily drown.

1096
01:50:20,380 --> 01:50:26,110
Banks, the son, Cody Banks, in a comic scene memorably depicted on the title page of the 1621 play text.

1097
01:50:26,830 --> 01:50:31,180
When Cuddy asks the witch to help him seduce Kate Carter, she tells him to follow her dog.

1098
01:50:31,750 --> 01:50:33,700
Are familiar. Who will lead him to the girl?

1099
01:50:33,760 --> 01:50:39,880
Instead, the dog whom Cuddy identifies as the water spaniel, leads him into an unnamed body of water up to his neck.

1100
01:50:40,330 --> 01:50:44,230
Katie cries offstage, Help. I'm drowned. I'm drowned. See here on the title page.

1101
01:50:44,440 --> 01:50:51,549
And immediately after the stage direction. As Katie enters the wet and its comic dunking of the clown, the scene springs to recalls,

1102
01:50:51,550 --> 01:50:59,470
dunk tanks and sponge tosses at village fits and which we might buy a benign recreation of sacrificial drownings and ancient rainmaking rituals.

1103
01:50:59,920 --> 01:51:03,159
After all, Katie is adorned in the costume of a morris dancer in the scene,

1104
01:51:03,160 --> 01:51:07,420
which some historians and early modern Puritans trace back to pre-Christian fertility rights.

1105
01:51:08,290 --> 01:51:13,359
The scene also stages a reversal of the ducking of the width, which cut here seems to allude to many complaints.

1106
01:51:13,360 --> 01:51:17,620
Let's have no more of these ducking devices. But he survived this ordeal.

1107
01:51:17,630 --> 01:51:21,490
But the scene does play on fears of thinking and flooding in marshland communities.

1108
01:51:22,060 --> 01:51:25,900
Audiences in 1621 familiar with the topography of Greater London would have likely

1109
01:51:25,900 --> 01:51:29,650
inferred that Curry has been plunged into the marshes at the edge of Edmonton.

1110
01:51:30,220 --> 01:51:34,710
Black magic cannot bring marsh to the town. It brings the townsfolk through and into the marsh.

1111
01:51:36,070 --> 01:51:41,620
Which of Edmonton also furnishes evidence that early modern believed witches were vectors for malaria like illnesses.

1112
01:51:42,160 --> 01:51:48,729
The theme that anticipates Wordsworth's beauty Blake and Harry Bill for your curses plagues not with an eternal chill,

1113
01:51:48,730 --> 01:51:53,799
but with physical pain by bones. They joints, cramp, convulsions, breath and crack.

1114
01:51:53,800 --> 01:52:00,430
They sinews along with fever and chills. Muscle and joint pain are among the most common conspicuous symptoms of malaria.

1115
01:52:01,000 --> 01:52:09,700
Bone loss and periodontitis are also characteristic of chronic malaria, which forensic archaeologists can detect through skeletal deterioration.

1116
01:52:11,060 --> 01:52:17,330
This supports the conjecture that Sawyer may have suffered from malaria herself since good kill reports in the pamphlet.

1117
01:52:17,330 --> 01:52:23,479
She was crooked and deformed, even bending together as illustrated by the portrait of her on the title page of both the

1118
01:52:23,480 --> 01:52:28,780
pamphlet in the play and the playwrights compare it to a a bow buckled and bent together.

1119
01:52:29,700 --> 01:52:32,780
Malaria patients also frequently develop anaemia.

1120
01:52:33,200 --> 01:52:38,840
And good call. Describe Sonja's complexion as pale and ghostlike, without any blood at all.

1121
01:52:40,410 --> 01:52:46,860
Unsightly appearance would have led the people of 17th century Edmonton to conclude she was afflicted with a disfiguring disease,

1122
01:52:47,220 --> 01:52:51,450
while the dread that it was transmissible was seemingly borne out by the fact so many of her own children had died.

1123
01:52:51,870 --> 01:52:54,420
No wonder she was shunned and hated like a sickness.

1124
01:52:55,080 --> 01:53:01,080
The community's fear of her may have led her to credit herself with the power to infect others, which is precisely what happens in the play.

1125
01:53:01,440 --> 01:53:05,730
Banks accusations of an abuse drives voyeurs into indulging in revenge fantasies.

1126
01:53:06,560 --> 01:53:10,010
Diseases, plagues, the curses of an old woman follow and fall upon you.

1127
01:53:10,640 --> 01:53:14,900
50 lines later, she repeats the similar curse. Rocks and formalities eat up and die.

1128
01:53:15,930 --> 01:53:20,300
Retaliating with these curses echoes the invectives of the deformed Caliban.

1129
01:53:20,310 --> 01:53:26,459
All the infections of the sun sucks up from fogs, bends, flat, sun, prosper, fall and his first appearance in the play,

1130
01:53:26,460 --> 01:53:31,080
Caliban has implied that his mother gathered wicked due from an unwholesome fen,

1131
01:53:31,560 --> 01:53:36,780
a practice malavika, and the people of Edmonton seem to suspect mother saw Europe doing the same.

1132
01:53:37,830 --> 01:53:44,880
But rather than sprinkle wicked do from a raven feather wand who dispatches her dog who bewitch the townsfolk by touching them.

1133
01:53:45,570 --> 01:53:51,270
Play here, I think, taps into fears of tho Nordic transmission of diseases like malaria in early modern England.

1134
01:53:52,160 --> 01:53:55,390
The archival research that undergirds this paper, the just mother story.

1135
01:53:55,490 --> 01:53:58,400
It may have been both a factor and a victim of malaria,

1136
01:53:58,790 --> 01:54:03,860
and knowing that she not only suffered physical pain, but the psychological trauma of losing six children.

1137
01:54:04,490 --> 01:54:10,760
Further, what the Jacobean playwrights flirt with, but far away from her elevation to tragic stature.

1138
01:54:12,910 --> 01:54:21,280
To conclude, I want to think about how we could compare the situation in Edmonton with studies of malaria and witchcraft in other parts of the world.

1139
01:54:22,260 --> 01:54:29,010
Research on ethnographic research in Africa has shown that it's very common for malaria to be blamed on black magic.

1140
01:54:29,280 --> 01:54:33,860
Researchers in Gambia found a malaria was attributed to bruja or witches who

1141
01:54:33,930 --> 01:54:37,380
are believed to conjure a foul wind to seek the life force of the bewitched.

1142
01:54:37,710 --> 01:54:42,960
But magic and science aren't mutually exclusive and places like West or South Africa.

1143
01:54:42,960 --> 01:54:51,480
A survey of the advocacy in Kenya revealed that while 80% accept that mosquitoes can be a vector, 34% still attribute malaria to witchcraft.

1144
01:54:52,110 --> 01:54:56,310
And the family in Cameroon subscribed to the notion that witches can infect people with disease,

1145
01:54:56,640 --> 01:55:01,620
but also tell an ideological myth that malaria arrived in the community when a thief switched a bag,

1146
01:55:01,620 --> 01:55:05,310
supposed to contain the ancestors blessings with a bag full of mosquitoes.

1147
01:55:06,620 --> 01:55:11,680
Many medical studies lament the supposed persistence of such beliefs and assume if people were better educated,

1148
01:55:11,930 --> 01:55:15,530
they would seek proper Western treatments rather than consult witchcraft.

1149
01:55:15,740 --> 01:55:17,870
Which doctors? Well, well, meaning?

1150
01:55:17,870 --> 01:55:25,070
Such studies can be, of course, patronising based on quack remedies and anti-scientific sentiments persist in the ostensibly enlightened West,

1151
01:55:25,310 --> 01:55:27,620
as COVID 19 is made painfully clear.

1152
01:55:28,070 --> 01:55:33,140
And historians of magic, I think, would do well to keep this in mind when drawing on ethnographic studies of witchcraft from outside Europe.

1153
01:55:33,710 --> 01:55:39,380
Comparisons between contemporary rural Africa and early modern England can unwittingly imply that the former remains mired in a primitive,

1154
01:55:39,380 --> 01:55:45,020
pre-modern past. But it's easy to trouble such assumptions with a thought experiment or a show of hands.

1155
01:55:45,530 --> 01:55:50,360
How many of you among us today have seen a microscopic app, a complex and protozoan parasite?

1156
01:55:51,570 --> 01:55:55,950
Imagine trying to explain Plasmodium vivax to inhabitant of Edmonton in 1621.

1157
01:55:56,550 --> 01:56:01,110
Why not say demon anthropologist to treat these folks properly, seriously?

1158
01:56:01,110 --> 01:56:06,059
And the same goes for historians of magic. Proposing a link between malaria and Malavika in early modern England,

1159
01:56:06,060 --> 01:56:10,320
this paper is not so much a plea for disenchantment as a provocation to think more about how

1160
01:56:10,320 --> 01:56:15,150
our understanding of witchcraft can be enriched by eco medical eco feminist approaches.

1161
01:56:16,070 --> 01:56:16,460
Thank you.

1162
01:56:17,180 --> 01:56:28,910
Amy Blakemore is a novelist whose first novel, The Manningtree Witches, actually managed to appeal to me as an accurate representation of witchcraft.

1163
01:56:29,120 --> 01:56:32,570
It would be great to hear from Amy if she's ready to comment.

1164
01:56:33,080 --> 01:56:40,250
I am a Blakemore for Amy, my debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, which came out a couple of years ago now.

1165
01:56:40,280 --> 01:56:46,700
I can never quite remember when precisely because of the kind of dilatory COVID time that we went through,

1166
01:56:47,360 --> 01:56:53,750
but is about the early career of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder general in Manningtree.

1167
01:56:54,290 --> 01:56:58,010
Manningtree is a place I know very well, a small town in Essex.

1168
01:56:58,400 --> 01:57:07,200
In fact, I believe it is the smallest town in England that still qualifies as a town about 10 minutes on the train outside of Colchester.

1169
01:57:07,220 --> 01:57:12,800
I'm sure a lot of you would have passed through it on your way to vastly more metropolitan Norwich.

1170
01:57:13,940 --> 01:57:19,520
And yes, a place I know well because my dad was there. So I'm down there kind of a few times a year.

1171
01:57:20,060 --> 01:57:25,310
And real and imagined history as a phrase is something that's very interesting to me,

1172
01:57:25,700 --> 01:57:30,950
because one of the things that sort of interested me most when I began writing the

1173
01:57:30,950 --> 01:57:36,169
novel was almost less the story itself and more the way the history and in fact,

1174
01:57:36,170 --> 01:57:42,650
the myth of the witch find a general has been transformed and revised by Manningtree and its inhabitants.

1175
01:57:44,060 --> 01:57:50,480
The last time I was down in Manningtree, I was giving a talk to a local book group at the Thorne of Mossley,

1176
01:57:50,780 --> 01:57:57,380
which of course historically, although it's disputed was the in the which find a general himself orange and brown.

1177
01:57:57,800 --> 01:58:03,890
It's still there and it's now fairly boujee gastropub with some rooms above.

1178
01:58:03,890 --> 01:58:11,510
If you're ever passing through it, it's great. Can recommend it. So after talking to this group, I decided to have a glass of wine at the bar.

1179
01:58:11,510 --> 01:58:15,650
And I was talking to the barman and he was discussing the book.

1180
01:58:15,800 --> 01:58:22,910
They sell little postcards of the frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins book, and he said,

1181
01:58:22,910 --> 01:58:27,590
I love taking people when they're staying at the pub to the room upstairs where he died.

1182
01:58:28,130 --> 01:58:31,640
And I was kind of, oh, there's a room that he supposedly died in. Which one?

1183
01:58:31,640 --> 01:58:33,469
And he says, well, whichever one they're staying in,

1184
01:58:33,470 --> 01:58:40,010
obviously every Halloween in the high streets of Manningtree, there is a witch finding competition.

1185
01:58:40,550 --> 01:58:44,750
And what this involves is Barbie dolls wearing little felts,

1186
01:58:44,750 --> 01:58:51,380
which hats that are left around the centre of town and the local children are exhorted to find them.

1187
01:58:52,160 --> 01:58:55,300
The information about this, the signs put up in shop windows and stuff.

1188
01:58:55,340 --> 01:58:58,370
Very, very careful to stress that you are finding them.

1189
01:58:58,400 --> 01:59:05,690
To save them. From Matthew Hawkins, the witch trying to general rather than to subject them to carceral violence as a sort of

1190
01:59:06,140 --> 01:59:11,480
equivocal ditty about the way that Manningtree interacts with its history in this regard.

1191
01:59:12,470 --> 01:59:15,680
Manningtree is now pretty much a commuter town.

1192
01:59:16,430 --> 01:59:19,820
It's very sparse, quiet, and has a slightly.

1193
01:59:20,180 --> 01:59:25,940
It's a very nebulous term. But coast energy, I would say, as so many small towns in England do.

1194
01:59:26,630 --> 01:59:34,250
Matthew Watkins was, I think, most memorably portrayed by Vincent Price and the Witchfinder film,

1195
01:59:34,790 --> 01:59:39,680
which is I'm kind of a massive fan of sixties, seventies schlock, folk horror.

1196
01:59:40,100 --> 01:59:46,700
So obviously I love the Witch Find the film. The tagline for which was England has never looked so beautiful or been so evil.

1197
01:59:47,270 --> 01:59:53,599
And a great part of it was filmed in a village near Manningtree Laburnum, which, unlike all the POTENTE,

1198
01:59:53,600 --> 01:59:57,760
which is a fairly erect throw, sets yourself apart from the pack through her neck.

1199
01:59:57,770 --> 02:00:03,319
Dramatic power and inhuman behaviour. She is said to be wholly impious with the gods themselves,

1200
02:00:03,320 --> 02:00:09,860
granting her every horrific wish she desires simply so that she leaves them alone and lives as an embodiment of death.

1201
02:00:10,550 --> 02:00:15,920
Everywhere she steps, she blights the seed and the rich field, and her breath poisons the untainted air.

1202
02:00:16,190 --> 02:00:18,469
Through the extreme description of her action,

1203
02:00:18,470 --> 02:00:23,510
looking is able to embellish upon the existing trope of the dangerous, the silly in witches of Roman literature.

1204
02:00:24,080 --> 02:00:28,510
While the graveyards of any location are sombre places of sadness and emotional suffering,

1205
02:00:28,520 --> 02:00:32,810
these sites are transformed into [INAUDIBLE] scapes through the usage of space.

1206
02:00:33,500 --> 02:00:38,930
So has absolute dominion over these sites and calls them home and this imagined landscape.

1207
02:00:38,930 --> 02:00:45,020
She lives almost like a ghost, sleeping through the days in the tombs of the dead and only emerging after nightfall.

1208
02:00:45,990 --> 02:00:52,680
The fact that these tombs are occupied by the ghosts of those interred matters, not to someone powerful enough to attract them.

1209
02:00:53,160 --> 02:01:00,270
A graveyard, of course, would give a powerful necromancer the easy access they would need to the corpses needed to enact magic.

1210
02:01:00,870 --> 02:01:07,620
She does not limit herself to controlling the shades of the restless dead, but morbidly interferes with the cemeteries, corpses,

1211
02:01:07,620 --> 02:01:13,079
and even the living knowing and clawing at the flesh of corpses buried in the graveyard

1212
02:01:13,080 --> 02:01:17,310
like a scavenging dog or a wolf and chewing on the nooses that suspend those hanged,

1213
02:01:18,210 --> 02:01:21,500
removing appendages and eyes from those dried and sarcophagi.

1214
02:01:21,510 --> 02:01:27,090
And when a corpse is too difficult for her to rip up on her own, she snatches the morsels from the mouths of wolves.

1215
02:01:28,050 --> 02:01:32,070
Aside from using the corpses for her potions and presumably for sustenance,

1216
02:01:32,070 --> 02:01:36,720
she can whisper into the corpses, open mouth and send messages down to the underworld.

1217
02:01:37,230 --> 02:01:43,740
Of all this horror, this last use of the corpses is most interesting from the perspective of her interactions with the site.

1218
02:01:44,160 --> 02:01:46,290
The corpse itself becomes something more.

1219
02:01:46,470 --> 02:01:52,950
Through the intermediate status, it is balanced in a liminal status, both once a human and now no more than a vacant shell.

1220
02:01:53,400 --> 02:02:01,140
Owing to this, Eric, though, is able to use the corpse as a vehicle through which she can communicate and pass messages beyond the veil of death.

1221
02:02:02,240 --> 02:02:05,690
In a grim manner of her ability to resurrect the dead from their tombs.

1222
02:02:06,140 --> 02:02:14,360
She, in much the same manner as Cornelio, is said to bury her living victims in graves, while fate still owes them years and take their lives.

1223
02:02:14,840 --> 02:02:21,590
She thus creates the restless, dead herself, when particularly evil and cruel shades are needed to do her deeds.

1224
02:02:22,580 --> 02:02:28,850
Worse still, she caused the throats of others and ripped the babies from their mother's wombs just to cremate them and altar fires.

1225
02:02:29,910 --> 02:02:33,960
She is living, being existing amongst the dead, described as a living corpse.

1226
02:02:34,060 --> 02:02:36,210
Absolute dominion over the balance between life and death,

1227
02:02:36,240 --> 02:02:40,920
able to force shades into the reanimated corpses and mock the fates by stealing the souls of the living.

1228
02:02:42,120 --> 02:02:49,409
Through physically interacting with what might be thought of as a civilised and safe setting, such as residential and horticultural landscapes.

1229
02:02:49,410 --> 02:02:57,140
Canada is able to unlock their latent necrotic potential by physically altering the landscape and enacting a bloody ritual in satire.

1230
02:02:57,150 --> 02:03:04,740
1.8 She is able to cast aside the thinly veiled exterior of the gardens of my seniors and utilise it for its original purpose.

1231
02:03:05,870 --> 02:03:11,269
In the case of Epic five, she employs commonplace objects from cemeteries as part of her murderous rite,

1232
02:03:11,270 --> 02:03:16,340
with the goal of blurring the line of reality and forcing supernatural power upon the human world,

1233
02:03:17,090 --> 02:03:21,980
employing the suffering and death of an innocent child to ensnare her lost lover psychologically.

1234
02:03:23,230 --> 02:03:28,180
Eric, though, also transforms the landscape in which her narrative is set through her interaction with it.

1235
02:03:29,080 --> 02:03:32,680
The facility and graveyards are used as a setting for her mockery of life and death.

1236
02:03:32,950 --> 02:03:38,590
Neither the living nor the dead are safe from a wreck. So stealing rest from spirits in the lives of those still breathing.

1237
02:03:39,400 --> 02:03:46,480
The potentially unsettling but wholly expected aspects of graveyards such as the tombs and corpses of the dead, are subverted through her actions.

1238
02:03:46,900 --> 02:03:50,080
The tombs become a domestic space for an inhuman and powerful witch,

1239
02:03:50,560 --> 02:03:55,390
and the lifeless shells that were once human are used to communicate with and control the spirits that they gave up.

1240
02:03:56,260 --> 02:04:03,700
Key to all of the narratives analysed are the anxieties that liminal spaces triggered in the contemporaries of the poet as places in the world,

1241
02:04:03,700 --> 02:04:05,470
but not entirely of the world.

1242
02:04:05,890 --> 02:04:11,920
Powerful and malicious witches can utilise them to bend nature and further break the barriers that protect the predictable,

1243
02:04:11,920 --> 02:04:16,150
civilised and safe terrestrial world from the unpredictable and dangerous.

1244
02:04:16,840 --> 02:04:18,850
And that is my conclusion.

1245
02:04:19,960 --> 02:04:29,620
Now we're going to hear from Julia Sherman, who's asked me to start by asking her question, because she says that's how she works best.

1246
02:04:30,250 --> 02:04:34,690
And indeed, I want to ask her a question about her working.

1247
02:04:35,350 --> 02:04:43,720
My big question is really, what for you as a fantasy writer and a writer of historical fiction,

1248
02:04:44,350 --> 02:04:52,570
all the connections between your chosen settings and the way that you would begin to imagine the story.

1249
02:04:52,750 --> 02:04:57,430
You said to me earlier that you start with settings, but how do you find associated setting?

1250
02:04:57,880 --> 02:05:00,550
Mostly by spending a lot of time in them.

1251
02:05:00,980 --> 02:05:08,830
And when I become interested in a place, for instance, when I got the first idea for the evil wizard Smallbone, which is set in Maine,

1252
02:05:09,070 --> 02:05:12,400
it was because a very old friend of mine has a house there,

1253
02:05:12,640 --> 02:05:19,360
which she very generously gives us when we want it for a week or two or three or sometimes four to work.

1254
02:05:19,420 --> 02:05:23,080
And she's not using it. She's a banker. She works a lot.

1255
02:05:23,440 --> 02:05:29,229
And so we go up to Maine, along the coast in a region of archipelagos, which I love.

1256
02:05:29,230 --> 02:05:38,230
I just like archipelagos are very magical to me. And I just started to think I really want to write something that is set here.

1257
02:05:38,500 --> 02:05:46,569
This is a place that is giving me a lot of feelings about the landscape, about the light, about the extremes of temperature.

1258
02:05:46,570 --> 02:05:55,510
Because frequently when I'm there, it's very hot in the summer and muggy and full of mosquitoes that are approximately the size of sparrows.

1259
02:05:55,690 --> 02:05:59,739
And in the winter it is famously cold and full of snow.

1260
02:05:59,740 --> 02:06:03,040
And in early spring it is still extremely unpleasant.

1261
02:06:03,100 --> 02:06:12,600
Winter lasts a long time for America there. So I was reading a story that I remembered from my childhood called The Wizards Apprentice.

1262
02:06:12,880 --> 02:06:18,400
It was about an apprentice who was sold by his father to a wizard.

1263
02:06:18,400 --> 02:06:26,229
It's a Russian tale, and he goes through a number of adventures where the wizard is exploiting him and

1264
02:06:26,230 --> 02:06:31,570
has turned his previous apprentices into birds and stones and things like that.

1265
02:06:31,780 --> 02:06:35,380
So I took that fairy tale, which I had long been interested in,

1266
02:06:35,560 --> 02:06:44,620
and I transferred it to Maine and I transferred it to a kind of a and it always feels to me as if when you go into Maine,

1267
02:06:44,620 --> 02:06:50,350
there are places that are very modern, and there are also places that could have been that way for the past 200 years.

1268
02:06:50,770 --> 02:06:56,770
So I took all of those things that I felt about Maine and I put them into that story.

1269
02:06:57,100 --> 02:07:04,180
So it is not a modern story because it takes place in a town where time does not actually operate very well.

1270
02:07:04,420 --> 02:07:09,280
That is outside of the rest of the world, outside of the rest of Maine.

1271
02:07:09,730 --> 02:07:15,460
And the mystery around that and the whole business with turning apprentices into farm animals,

1272
02:07:15,790 --> 02:07:22,540
which allowed me to have conversations when I was doing the research for it with a man

1273
02:07:22,540 --> 02:07:28,090
who hunts coyotes for a living and sells the tales and the pelts at the county fair.

1274
02:07:28,360 --> 02:07:31,870
And I talked to the guy who raised pigs, and he was, like I said,

1275
02:07:31,870 --> 02:07:36,729
I'm writing a book and it's got a pig in it and I need to know something about pigs and what they're like.

1276
02:07:36,730 --> 02:07:39,880
And he was like, I can tell you all about pigs.

1277
02:07:40,210 --> 02:07:44,260
And they're playful and they're intelligent and they play games with you.

1278
02:07:44,560 --> 02:07:49,510
And, you know, here's this large thing that we think that lies in the mud and grunts a lot and didn't know.

1279
02:07:49,840 --> 02:07:57,700
So all of that became all the meanness of Maine as I talked to people and stayed there and experienced

1280
02:07:57,700 --> 02:08:04,989
the weather and read things about Maine and read a book of the way people used to speak in Maine,

1281
02:08:04,990 --> 02:08:10,300
they don't so much anymore because like everything else, the regional accent has become terribly homogenised.

1282
02:08:10,750 --> 02:08:13,840
But there are still people who have those speech patterns.

1283
02:08:13,960 --> 02:08:20,380
Some of the regional expressions are very much of that time and very much of that place still.

1284
02:08:20,710 --> 02:08:25,500
So I just. Through it all into the hopper and made the book that I made.

1285
02:08:25,770 --> 02:08:30,710
There's also a large collection of people who were in Canada.

1286
02:08:30,720 --> 02:08:40,890
The French Huguenots moved into northern Maine, and so there's a large French speaking population, and possibly some of them were werewolves.

1287
02:08:41,040 --> 02:08:44,880
And there aren't any rules in Maine anymore. So now they're coyotes.

1288
02:08:45,180 --> 02:08:54,510
So I have a gang of motorcycle riding coyotes that are under the domination of a Luca who who came over to Canada and got thrown out.

1289
02:08:54,540 --> 02:09:01,890
So it all comes together that way. It tends to cohere around a place and the closeness of that place.

1290
02:09:02,670 --> 02:09:06,360
Okay. I almost want to say maybe other people have questions, too,

1291
02:09:06,630 --> 02:09:13,500
but I do have a number of follow up questions based on that really fascinating account as I read it,

1292
02:09:13,500 --> 02:09:23,280
a series of discoveries and noticed things as you move through and around the setting that started with an archipelago and the weather,

1293
02:09:23,730 --> 02:09:34,140
but increasingly became about talking to people and learning about the way that they had experienced the place that had fascinated you.

1294
02:09:34,800 --> 02:09:38,970
So there's something here, and this isn't in any way meant to be demeaning,

1295
02:09:38,970 --> 02:09:45,600
but it touches on many of the things we've been discussing about, I suppose, the role of the traveller in the landscape,

1296
02:09:45,600 --> 02:09:54,149
the way that when we move through a landscape that isn't the landscape of our birth or when the landscape of our past becomes unfamiliar to us,

1297
02:09:54,150 --> 02:10:05,580
usually because we've left it and come back. To what extent is that estrangement a precondition for noticing what might not strike?

1298
02:10:05,580 --> 02:10:09,149
Somebody who'd spent their entire life in Maine, for example,

1299
02:10:09,150 --> 02:10:17,670
is the oddity of the climate sort of not visible to you if you are a maine hunter or woodsman and you just this is how it always is.

1300
02:10:17,670 --> 02:10:24,960
It's always like the sheer number of things that Mainers proverbial have to say about the weather makes it completely.

1301
02:10:25,020 --> 02:10:28,720
I mean, yes, they notice constantly. Okay.

1302
02:10:28,800 --> 02:10:40,020
But I feel as if I were born on the outside. I was born in Tokyo, Japan, as part of the occupying American army as a side effect of the Korean War.

1303
02:10:40,200 --> 02:10:43,650
I was brought back when I was three to New York.

1304
02:10:43,830 --> 02:10:49,469
My parents were unusually elderly because I was adopted and they would not be allowed to adopt.

1305
02:10:49,470 --> 02:11:00,030
My mother was 54. My mother was born in 1898, so I know where I have been or what I have experienced in my life has made me feel like an insider.

1306
02:11:00,450 --> 02:11:07,259
So I am always a traveller and I'm actually quite happy with that because that allows

1307
02:11:07,260 --> 02:11:12,870
me to be an observer wherever I go and every place is slightly strange to me.

1308
02:11:12,870 --> 02:11:15,330
The place that is the most familiar is New York,

1309
02:11:15,660 --> 02:11:24,540
and I never wrote about it until I lived in Massachusetts for 30 years because I was not moved to write about New York until I missed it,

1310
02:11:24,810 --> 02:11:33,570
until I needed to engage with it. And the thing that I have written the most about is Paris in France, where I have never actually lived,

1311
02:11:33,570 --> 02:11:39,030
although we spent a year there a few years back before the pandemic, and I am currently writing about it.

1312
02:11:39,330 --> 02:11:44,100
It's a historical novel about the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris in the Commune.

1313
02:11:44,400 --> 02:11:49,170
And it was very important to me that the last time we were there,

1314
02:11:49,170 --> 02:11:54,510
which is three weeks ago when I was doing some research in the libraries that we live in my mouth,

1315
02:11:54,650 --> 02:12:03,210
which is not where we usually set down our roots, because I knew that Montmartre had changed incredibly from what everybody thinks it is now.

1316
02:12:03,540 --> 02:12:10,199
Sacré-coeur was built after the commune of Paris, mostly as a cock of the snook by the Church of France,

1317
02:12:10,200 --> 02:12:15,870
by the Catholic Church, to the secularist society that the commune wanted to set up.

1318
02:12:16,020 --> 02:12:21,209
And street names were changed, streets were torn down, buildings were built.

1319
02:12:21,210 --> 02:12:27,860
It was largely a farming community. It had only become part of Paris five years before.

1320
02:12:28,110 --> 02:12:35,069
So it was being on my mail tour and going to the museum and talking to the people and seeing the photographs

1321
02:12:35,070 --> 02:12:43,290
of what moments looked like during the late sixties and early seventies was really you needed to feel it,

1322
02:12:43,290 --> 02:12:47,129
you needed to feel and they still have cobblestones so you can feel.

1323
02:12:47,130 --> 02:12:49,710
But the streets feel like it's not like walking on pavement.

1324
02:12:50,190 --> 02:12:55,649
It's a different kind of cobblestones on the sidewalks and the sidewalks are only so wide and some of

1325
02:12:55,650 --> 02:13:02,040
them used to be dirt and there are pictures of those and to see the boulevard to something or other.

1326
02:13:02,040 --> 02:13:07,320
And it's a mud path. It is now not, but it was then.

1327
02:13:07,680 --> 02:13:11,930
And so it's really getting a city of cities here.

1328
02:13:11,940 --> 02:13:22,560
My landscape a lot more than the countryside is getting the city into your bones for me is an absolute necessity to be able to fit a narrow.

1329
02:13:22,870 --> 02:13:28,710
Into it because it is a narrative. It's something where three things cause other things.

1330
02:13:28,720 --> 02:13:37,660
It's it's it has a story. So it really almost, I think in almost everything I've written, where it is said is one of the characters.

1331
02:13:38,860 --> 02:13:40,780
Okay. So as a reader,

1332
02:13:40,780 --> 02:13:50,500
I often feel that reviewers overlook setting and talk about it as if it was just a backdrop in a theatre and not a very interesting backdrop at that.

1333
02:13:50,950 --> 02:13:55,599
But I think one of the things that's really emerging in this conference is actually the

1334
02:13:55,600 --> 02:14:00,730
centrality of place to almost everything that we think we are and that we think we do.

1335
02:14:01,540 --> 02:14:07,119
So I suppose my next question is going to be how we turn that sense of place,

1336
02:14:07,120 --> 02:14:18,339
those cobblestones under our feet and our awareness that where there was once sacré-coeur that was something else into meaning that I mean,

1337
02:14:18,340 --> 02:14:26,080
obviously billions of people traipse through mammoths every year and climb up the top of the sacré-coeur to see the view,

1338
02:14:26,090 --> 02:14:31,240
something I've always found very difficult to understand, partly because I hate heights, but there's something that I hate.

1339
02:14:31,250 --> 02:14:42,729
I think there's something intriguing about the wish to do that and not that to make it into the kind of narratives that you see.

1340
02:14:42,730 --> 02:14:51,940
I'm interested by writing. It's almost as panorama substitutes for the kind of historical thinking that I can hear in

1341
02:14:51,940 --> 02:14:57,700
your engagement with the Maine dialect and its potential Evanescence and disappearance,

1342
02:14:58,240 --> 02:15:01,660
or the mud that used to be on the pavements.

1343
02:15:01,660 --> 02:15:05,620
I mean, I suppose my question is, obviously everyone here thinks about the past all the time,

1344
02:15:06,070 --> 02:15:11,059
but it's interesting that Paris in particular seems to be swamped by people who don't want to think about it,

1345
02:15:11,060 --> 02:15:14,920
to want it never to change and never to have changed before.

1346
02:15:15,070 --> 02:15:19,860
Why are you different? I don't know.

1347
02:15:19,860 --> 02:15:25,589
I seem to have been born that way, but I also think that I am very aware,

1348
02:15:25,590 --> 02:15:31,050
which is another way of saying I was born, that way of why things are the way they are and I was a child.

1349
02:15:31,230 --> 02:15:39,690
I mean, every child asks why, but the kinds of things I tended to wonder about had to do with how did this get to be this way?

1350
02:15:40,110 --> 02:15:46,499
And when you see those connections, if you've got the kind of mind that wonders on connections,

1351
02:15:46,500 --> 02:15:58,470
it is not lost to me that they chose to build sacré-coeur on the arms park where they dragged all of the cannon and it was full of artillery.

1352
02:15:58,650 --> 02:16:11,460
So it was a locus of war and the material of war and fought was planted on top of it was a church of the sacred heart of mercy and Ruth.

1353
02:16:11,850 --> 02:16:20,729
And on top of that, I was really reminded in both of the papers that came before that death and cemeteries I've

1354
02:16:20,730 --> 02:16:25,590
been in a lot of cemeteries recently are a way of honouring the dead or memorialising,

1355
02:16:25,590 --> 02:16:29,940
the dead of bringing the dead into our lives so that they are not forgotten.

1356
02:16:30,180 --> 02:16:35,669
And one of the major things that happened during the commune was that people were shot down

1357
02:16:35,670 --> 02:16:41,010
in the street and frequently they would be thrown into a hole that a cannonball had made.

1358
02:16:41,640 --> 02:16:45,299
They were buried in courtyards, they were buried in mud streets.

1359
02:16:45,300 --> 02:16:49,200
They were tossed into group graves. They needed to be forgotten.

1360
02:16:49,320 --> 02:16:54,750
The government needed it to forget them. And they always said, Oh, you know, we killed a few people.

1361
02:16:54,750 --> 02:16:55,889
And it was terrible.

1362
02:16:55,890 --> 02:17:02,910
It was probably about 10,000 people and that was a lot they realised when you look at all of the scholarship that's been done about it,

1363
02:17:02,910 --> 02:17:10,140
that the real number of the working class that were executed at the end of the commune was closer to 40,000,

1364
02:17:10,620 --> 02:17:21,149
which was a significant portion of the population of Paris and also created later a joke, which is why can't you find any workmen in Paris?

1365
02:17:21,150 --> 02:17:26,640
Well, we shot them all. That was a real fire slapper in 1872.

1366
02:17:26,910 --> 02:17:35,370
So that kind of almost ritual desecration of the dead and rubbing them out and saying they did

1367
02:17:35,370 --> 02:17:41,730
not exist makes sacré-coeur not only one of the ugliest things I have ever seen in my life,

1368
02:17:42,060 --> 02:17:46,140
but also one of the most morally ugly things I have seen in my life.

1369
02:17:46,830 --> 02:17:50,970
And it was in Whitechapel. You're saying it's a white and sepulchre, aren't you?

1370
02:17:51,060 --> 02:17:55,980
I mean, you know, I almost never look at it the same way again.

1371
02:17:55,980 --> 02:18:01,530
And I hope others feel the same. That one of the reasons that when you're a writer and you're a novelist,

1372
02:18:01,530 --> 02:18:08,609
one of the things you can do is say this is this was here is what it could mean.

1373
02:18:08,610 --> 02:18:12,629
This is what it seems to have meant. And people don't know that.

1374
02:18:12,630 --> 02:18:16,470
I mean, it's not even knowing the facts of history is one thing.

1375
02:18:16,710 --> 02:18:25,320
Making them come alive in a way that make people think about the present while they're looking at the past is another.

1376
02:18:25,320 --> 02:18:31,020
And I think that that's something that fiction can do emotionally as well as intellectually.

1377
02:18:31,820 --> 02:18:38,370
I think one of the lovely things about this event is how willing everyone in academia is then to learn

1378
02:18:38,370 --> 02:18:46,500
from creative practitioners about how best to conduct the work of imagination that actually we all do.

1379
02:18:47,040 --> 02:18:54,060
I mean, I wouldn't be willing to make a very sharp distinction between what historians do, what archaeologists do, and what novelists do.

1380
02:18:54,570 --> 02:19:01,920
In fact, Martin Carver said, in my presence, once archaeologists dig things up and then they make up stories about them,

1381
02:19:02,550 --> 02:19:07,770
which sounds like a pretty accurate description of what your process is as well.

1382
02:19:07,770 --> 02:19:10,889
It's hard to you. And also it's fun.

1383
02:19:10,890 --> 02:19:17,160
It's fun to put your mind in a place and in a time and in a person that you are not.

1384
02:19:17,460 --> 02:19:24,990
I believe in writing what you want to know about. I guess my further question, though, which might make this a bit darker.

1385
02:19:25,950 --> 02:19:29,850
Is just turning to some of the questions that arose yesterday.

1386
02:19:30,080 --> 02:19:36,000
And fair enough. You were being one of the wise women of Glasgow, so going to cheerfully summarise the bit that I made.

1387
02:19:36,360 --> 02:19:46,259
We're all talking about, I suppose, under some general heading of colonialism and ideas about ownership and ideas

1388
02:19:46,260 --> 02:19:51,540
about the right to tell stories and ideas about the power to tell stories.

1389
02:19:51,540 --> 02:19:51,920
Right.

1390
02:19:52,660 --> 02:20:03,240
One of the things that struck me partly because I read I've been recently reading some early American descriptions by obvious colonising figures,

1391
02:20:03,960 --> 02:20:09,180
is that one of the huge attractions of Harriet's description of Virginia,

1392
02:20:09,180 --> 02:20:13,110
for example, is actually not at all dissimilar to what you're describing about men.

1393
02:20:13,560 --> 02:20:19,260
It's the attraction that we naturally feel for somebody who is themselves the stranger in the world,

1394
02:20:19,860 --> 02:20:24,629
trying from blindly but curiously to understand that world.

1395
02:20:24,630 --> 02:20:30,570
And I mean, Harriet wasn't straightforwardly bigoted or even straightforwardly conquistador.

1396
02:20:30,780 --> 02:20:36,210
She made the first Algonquin Grammar, though she made it for slightly colonialist purposes.

1397
02:20:37,400 --> 02:20:49,370
So I guess I'm wondering what scruples might afflict us all in terms of that sense of necessary estrangement,

1398
02:20:49,370 --> 02:20:54,830
all the things that we have to have a kind of birthright to.

1399
02:20:55,980 --> 02:21:03,010
Well, we have the birthright to being human. But my feeling is really that if you acknowledge.

1400
02:21:03,360 --> 02:21:11,910
Everything I have written has included someone who is coming into a situation that they're not familiar with.

1401
02:21:12,330 --> 02:21:18,720
So even though the hero that I have, the evil wisdom, Smallbone is a mainer,

1402
02:21:19,020 --> 02:21:23,399
he's from a different part of Maine, and he comes from a very different background.

1403
02:21:23,400 --> 02:21:27,540
And although he himself is not really, I made him up completely.

1404
02:21:27,540 --> 02:21:34,530
And his situation is one that I have learned about from friends who have come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

1405
02:21:34,920 --> 02:21:38,190
But you do your homework, you do your best.

1406
02:21:38,370 --> 02:21:46,890
You try to approach what you're doing, not as the wonderful and exotic, but as the absolutely real,

1407
02:21:47,100 --> 02:21:56,220
and that you've got a responsibility to make it as real as you can and not just say, this is the truth.

1408
02:21:56,430 --> 02:22:04,760
This is the truth of this story. And if you get the truth of the story right, it doesn't have to be true for all time.

1409
02:22:04,770 --> 02:22:09,060
It's like when people say, what do Americans think? Well, I don't know.

1410
02:22:09,330 --> 02:22:15,210
I know what a white, middle class woman of considerable privilege and education thinks.

1411
02:22:15,480 --> 02:22:20,520
But I can't speak for. But I can put myself not in that position.

1412
02:22:20,640 --> 02:22:28,290
The more I try to imagine myself as somebody who I am not, I think the more I understand everybody's humanity.

1413
02:22:28,560 --> 02:22:33,300
And as long as I don't act, I don't make them a point of view character.

1414
02:22:33,510 --> 02:22:42,210
And I do my best not to objectify them, but to make them part of the world that my characters are moving around in.

1415
02:22:42,450 --> 02:22:47,390
That's the due diligence I can do, and that is an imaginative thing.

1416
02:22:47,400 --> 02:22:53,430
Only writing about oneself, I think, is extremely limiting and not respectful of the rest of the world.

1417
02:22:53,910 --> 02:23:03,149
Also, I think that we need to maybe write or something and we just need to allow more voices in as well.

1418
02:23:03,150 --> 02:23:06,720
And people age out. People don't always write books. People get sick.

1419
02:23:06,900 --> 02:23:13,110
There are many reasons not to be writing a book, but it doesn't have to be an economy of scarcity.

1420
02:23:13,560 --> 02:23:22,320
I think that having an economy of generosity and abundance and having a lot of voices that people can listen to is the most important thing.

1421
02:23:23,490 --> 02:23:30,660
Lovely. And this is a perfect way in to the question that John MATTHEWS has asked through Caitlin MATTHEWS,

1422
02:23:30,900 --> 02:23:34,650
which is what is it about Fairey this enthrals you?

1423
02:23:35,580 --> 02:23:41,520
Because it makes such a beautiful metaphor and because people through history have used it,

1424
02:23:42,540 --> 02:23:49,490
whatever they believed was true or not, it remains emotionally true, whether it is physically true or not.

1425
02:23:49,860 --> 02:23:57,180
And the things that one hopes for and one tries to make come about it in anything you can.

1426
02:23:57,930 --> 02:24:04,770
Even without magic, you can try to make someone love you by owning them and stalking them and doing all of these things.

1427
02:24:04,770 --> 02:24:16,739
It's a kind of magical thinking anyway. Human beings tend towards magic and bringing it up and using it instead of saying that it doesn't exist.

1428
02:24:16,740 --> 02:24:20,700
I think psychologically realistic is great.

1429
02:24:20,710 --> 02:24:26,130
So that's a wonderful defensive theory because what you're actually saying is relatively close,

1430
02:24:26,130 --> 02:24:30,330
I think, to what J.R.R. Tolkien says about why we need it.

1431
02:24:30,480 --> 02:24:43,050
We need it because it is in some sense an aspect of the normative us, which is interesting to think quests in relation to, for example, Laura's paper.

1432
02:24:43,630 --> 02:24:49,709
Well, yeah, that, that there are parts of ourselves perhaps that we wish weren't there,

1433
02:24:49,710 --> 02:24:53,520
that we would like to go away, that we would like to pretend don't exist.

1434
02:24:54,060 --> 02:24:58,830
And perhaps it's the job of the truth of writing.

1435
02:24:59,220 --> 02:25:06,000
Not to shy away from those darkness is just in the interests of giving everyone a good time.

1436
02:25:06,540 --> 02:25:11,670
But perhaps we can also only have a good time by knowing that those darkness is all with us.

1437
02:25:11,760 --> 02:25:19,080
Always. Yeah. Perhaps I'll enjoy Sacré-coeur more and think of it as less of a big meringue.

1438
02:25:19,650 --> 02:25:23,340
No, I'm increasingly starting to see it through your eyes.

1439
02:25:23,340 --> 02:25:26,450
It's a poisoned meringue. What is it?

1440
02:25:26,460 --> 02:25:30,330
Meringue. And which is in itself absolutely wonderful.

1441
02:25:30,750 --> 02:25:38,700
I guess my final question for you, Julian, you've been incredibly brave and gallant in tackling all the things that I've been asking might be.

1442
02:25:38,910 --> 02:25:47,940
Is it necessary for you physically to go to Myanmar for she see the moment that no longer exists?

1443
02:25:48,960 --> 02:25:52,410
I like to travel. Well, yeah.

1444
02:25:52,410 --> 02:26:01,229
I mean, I don't really know. I mean, I haven't really written anything important about a place that I have not spent time in.

1445
02:26:01,230 --> 02:26:07,110
I've written about Louisiana because my my mother came from there and I have kin.

1446
02:26:07,470 --> 02:26:12,990
I spent part of my childhood there. And we get back there from time to time because I just I like Louisiana.

1447
02:26:13,650 --> 02:26:18,600
I don't like their politics, but I, I find the Cajun culture and the rest of it.

1448
02:26:18,600 --> 02:26:25,500
I've written a couple stories about it. I've written a novel. So they are places that I feel a real connection to.

1449
02:26:25,710 --> 02:26:32,070
The only place that I've never been to that I wrote about was a short story called The Maid on the Shore.

1450
02:26:32,340 --> 02:26:39,660
I said it in Nova Scotia, and I've never been to Nova Scotia, but it took place in ballad land, right?

1451
02:26:39,960 --> 02:26:45,810
And so it was Ballard Land was sea. And I spent a lot of time by the sea and I know what the rocks look like.

1452
02:26:45,810 --> 02:26:52,950
And so there you go. That's kind of getting a sense of the distances and places is what was very important

1453
02:26:52,950 --> 02:26:57,209
to me about my mantra is how long would it take to walk from place to place?

1454
02:26:57,210 --> 02:27:04,410
What does the city look like? Because you read these things, it says that they shot Cannon off of my mouth and they hit depressions.

1455
02:27:04,680 --> 02:27:07,680
And you think, wait a minute, how could that possibly be?

1456
02:27:07,830 --> 02:27:14,970
When you're standing up there, you can see that there are two sides of the hill and places that they could have done that they were near the ramparts.

1457
02:27:15,240 --> 02:27:20,910
We tend to think of it as only facing in one direction, but it faces into it's it's a hill.

1458
02:27:21,780 --> 02:27:29,610
It's not a city. Understood. So you're drawing attention to the actually the limits of our imagination in turning a map

1459
02:27:30,120 --> 02:27:34,730
into something like a lived experience and a sense of the possible and the surprising.

1460
02:27:34,770 --> 02:27:38,549
Yeah, fantastic. Personally I'm rubbish with maps, so that might be just me.

1461
02:27:38,550 --> 02:27:41,790
But yeah. Well, I think we can thank Julia from here.

1462
02:27:42,330 --> 02:27:48,060
And we also have with us Maria Hadley, whose work has already been referenced twice at this conference.

1463
02:27:48,270 --> 02:27:53,370
Maria is probably best known for her novel, The Midwife.

1464
02:27:53,610 --> 02:27:59,250
Marvellous, unsettling, disturbing, thrilling, all those things.

1465
02:27:59,700 --> 02:28:04,590
And increasingly, I think it's going to be known for her translation of Beowulf.

1466
02:28:05,130 --> 02:28:14,670
And she's going to talk to us today about her work at moment, which is amazingly turning veneered into a musical.

1467
02:28:15,600 --> 02:28:19,830
Maria, are you sure? Yes, you are here.

1468
02:28:20,610 --> 02:28:30,929
Hi. So I'm going to talk. About working with story and making magic out of words as entwined with the topic of the conference place.

1469
02:28:30,930 --> 02:28:38,580
Magic. Humans have always lingered in the dark, whispering to ourselves, trying to find the right magic words to bring the light.

1470
02:28:39,210 --> 02:28:44,580
We regularly make magic out of scraps and broadcast our certainty to our communities, our readers,

1471
02:28:44,580 --> 02:28:50,370
our listeners, passing our cartography of the sacred and splendid on to future generations.

1472
02:28:51,060 --> 02:28:54,030
At this very moment, in these zoom windows were sitting in wait.

1473
02:28:54,040 --> 02:29:00,269
Had they existed a thousand years ago, would assuredly have been magical places akin to grottoes in Cuba,

1474
02:29:00,270 --> 02:29:04,920
from which civil spat, prophecy, poetry and politics to those who have been passed.

1475
02:29:05,730 --> 02:29:10,170
Does the prosaic nature of virtual conferencing make these windows any less magical?

1476
02:29:10,350 --> 02:29:17,130
Not as far as I'm concerned. Magic is a made thing put into the world with the combination of agenda and serendipity.

1477
02:29:17,460 --> 02:29:24,840
And poets have always taken advantage of their capacity to create magic with mere words, myself included, words in one other ingredient.

1478
02:29:25,650 --> 02:29:32,220
Before I get to that ingredient, though, a story. Back in 2019, I had a three month old baby and brain fog.

1479
02:29:32,610 --> 02:29:36,870
An editor at Audible called me one day and asked if I could do something with the Aeneid.

1480
02:29:37,300 --> 02:29:41,430
A full cast audio adaptation. 8 hours long, ten episodes.

1481
02:29:41,880 --> 02:29:49,560
Of course, I said, I sleep deprived, brained, thinking that making a new version of the Aeneid and turning it into 8 hours of dialogue would be easy.

1482
02:29:50,460 --> 02:29:56,720
I had no allegiance to the job. I'd read Danny had sort of 20 or 30 years prior, and all I remembered was Dido.

1483
02:29:56,730 --> 02:30:01,080
But Dido, I figured, would be fun. So is that the right word?

1484
02:30:01,920 --> 02:30:03,299
Soon after I signed the contracts,

1485
02:30:03,300 --> 02:30:09,390
the pandemic hit and trapped in a tiny apartment on the California coast with an infant now allowed to walk on the beach.

1486
02:30:09,390 --> 02:30:14,550
I discovered to my dismay that the only thing my brain knew to do with the Aeneid was to make it into a musical.

1487
02:30:15,570 --> 02:30:22,040
So for too long pandemic years, I worked on an eight hour musical and yet done Man of La mancha style,

1488
02:30:22,050 --> 02:30:28,650
the epic poem mixed with a story about the difficulties of being a writer working for an emperor in the first century B.C.,

1489
02:30:29,010 --> 02:30:34,630
a poet with writer's block trying to write an epic just like me, with songs about the gods.

1490
02:30:34,680 --> 02:30:39,540
Lots of them. In May of 2022, exhausted and very done was virtual.

1491
02:30:39,780 --> 02:30:47,310
I turned in the final draft at last and checked into a hotel to start the next project, writing this paper about magic in place.

1492
02:30:47,820 --> 02:30:53,520
I opened the blinds to look out over Dallas, Texas, and discovered the words for Jess Fortuna.

1493
02:30:53,610 --> 02:30:57,900
A devout page hid in huge letters on the roof of the poolhouse below me.

1494
02:30:58,320 --> 02:31:01,710
Fortune favours The Bold is the most quoted line from the Iliad.

1495
02:31:02,070 --> 02:31:05,340
Although this version happened bizarrely to be the last words of Pliny the

1496
02:31:05,340 --> 02:31:09,060
Elder as he approached his death from volcanic fumes on the beach at Pompeii.

1497
02:31:09,810 --> 02:31:11,730
The line has proven useful over the centuries.

1498
02:31:11,730 --> 02:31:17,250
Whenever people needed some magic words to conjure up the notion of a God driven who can't help it, [INAUDIBLE] the consequences.

1499
02:31:17,250 --> 02:31:17,760
Quest.

1500
02:31:18,540 --> 02:31:26,160
In this context, it apparently urged guests to defend history themselves or maybe to get their asses down to the pool to drink too many frozen drinks.

1501
02:31:26,790 --> 02:31:33,390
Surely, though, the purpose was to make hotel guests feel as though they themselves were on a high stakes, spectacular adventure.

1502
02:31:34,110 --> 02:31:42,480
And I felt it. I stood at the window, transformed into the heroine of an epic and also complicated, transformed into Pliny,

1503
02:31:42,690 --> 02:31:47,400
growing toward his demise, taken to the classical world by three words, words of magic,

1504
02:31:47,880 --> 02:31:53,520
a proverb on the poolhouse Roof transformed the hotel into an epic location filled with ferocious warriors,

1505
02:31:53,790 --> 02:32:00,510
jealous deities, monsters and a bit of black magic often benefits from a bit of a dead language rung into the cauldron.

1506
02:32:00,810 --> 02:32:04,980
If magic weren't difficult, if magic didn't require skills, everyone would be doing it.

1507
02:32:05,490 --> 02:32:10,050
Throwing in some abracadabra grounds the magic in the same way a geological location can.

1508
02:32:10,410 --> 02:32:14,010
It has the added benefit of making the reader feel smart enough to be a sorcerer.

1509
02:32:14,610 --> 02:32:18,900
All of this brings me to the other part of magic created by writers location.

1510
02:32:19,620 --> 02:32:26,420
When you're making some magic with just a few words, when you want to cause a reader to time travel, envisioning with certainty their destination.

1511
02:32:26,430 --> 02:32:31,320
Even if that destination is imaginary, you can use the magic of mention to ground your spell.

1512
02:32:31,860 --> 02:32:35,840
The magic of mention is all over both classical and contemporary literature,

1513
02:32:35,850 --> 02:32:43,380
one name causing the entirety of history to bobbed to the surface for a moment before disappearing again to allow the story to continue.

1514
02:32:44,160 --> 02:32:48,959
It enables a writer to load a sentence with multiple versions of a story to claim and

1515
02:32:48,960 --> 02:32:53,550
utilise various storytelling lineages without being forced to delve deeply into there.

1516
02:32:54,270 --> 02:33:02,339
The mention of a clear location can be invested in imagined wonder with history and yield a wonder that seems real in fantastical fiction,

1517
02:33:02,340 --> 02:33:04,499
whether epic poetry or contemporary novels,

1518
02:33:04,500 --> 02:33:12,450
we often open the book to find a map in the front piece, letting us know that what happens here is located, even if it's set in an imaginary land.

1519
02:33:12,900 --> 02:33:17,129
To give a more recent storytelling example and what relevant to the story one

1520
02:33:17,130 --> 02:33:20,520
based in the Dallas location I found myself in as I worked on this paper,

1521
02:33:20,520 --> 02:33:28,440
mentioned the words grassy knoll, for example, and instantly acquire a subtext of mystery, conspiracy, disappearance, and an event that,

1522
02:33:28,440 --> 02:33:33,930
through conflicting narratives, yielded ongoing chaos about which version of history would persevere.

1523
02:33:34,230 --> 02:33:40,860
The cast of characters appears with those two words JFK, Marilyn Monroe and that skin tight, crystal bedecked dress.

1524
02:33:41,100 --> 02:33:48,570
Singing Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Jackie in a pink Chanel suit spattered with blood and of course, Arthurian myths overlaying the whole thing.

1525
02:33:49,290 --> 02:33:56,129
A fence and shadows behind it. A sorceress, puff of smoke, American catastrophe and American magic.

1526
02:33:56,130 --> 02:34:04,590
All brought into being with just two words. In The Aeneid, Virgil uses the magic of mentioned to press the history of myth into his epic poem,

1527
02:34:05,070 --> 02:34:11,700
mention of which an unremarkable island is instantly imbued with sex, seduction, coercion and transformation.

1528
02:34:11,940 --> 02:34:17,009
Mention a monster and a hillside is hollowed. Now a quest point and a battle to be fought.

1529
02:34:17,010 --> 02:34:21,810
And one mentioned Hades and a sulphurous lake becomes a portal to the underworld,

1530
02:34:22,200 --> 02:34:26,880
mentioned Kuma, in every whisper in the region, becomes prophecy, every rumour, trust.

1531
02:34:27,300 --> 02:34:32,880
Virgil mentioned all of these things in a poem, otherwise stuffed full of lineage in famously slow sections,

1532
02:34:33,300 --> 02:34:41,370
he relied upon magical places and magical references to make his Aeneid felt suitably Homeric an odyssey for Imperial Rome part of a long tradition.

1533
02:34:41,730 --> 02:34:45,540
Despite being a recently commissioned work for Augustus's use in convincing

1534
02:34:45,540 --> 02:34:49,230
the population that he'd been named by the gods as the best driller of Rome,

1535
02:34:50,490 --> 02:34:56,010
as it was trained to turn Virgil's Aeneid into something palatable and intriguing for modern audio drama listeners,

1536
02:34:56,310 --> 02:35:00,420
I decided to utilise the accrued magic of places in the same way Virgil had.

1537
02:35:01,140 --> 02:35:07,290
Book six of the Aeneid is set at Cooma and in the underworld, and my version of the story has Virgil maddened by writer's block,

1538
02:35:07,290 --> 02:35:13,980
fleeing the emperor, whose commissioned his poem and landing at Cooma himself, seeking to enter Hades and find his possibly dead lover.

1539
02:35:14,240 --> 02:35:24,320
Yes. CUOMO By 19 B.C.E., when Virgil was finishing up the ended was a resort with bathhouses, a Roman summer pool party destination.

1540
02:35:24,680 --> 02:35:29,900
There were symbols still offered scripted prophecies. For her case, I depicted Clay as a Vegas equivalent.

1541
02:35:29,930 --> 02:35:35,260
There's a song in the musical called What Happens in Cuba but Vegas with real magic beneath it.

1542
02:35:35,810 --> 02:35:42,320
Virgil descends to Hades to seek his beloved, finds a symbol, and uses her as a guide through the history of poetry and propaganda.

1543
02:35:42,800 --> 02:35:47,180
I use the same technique to press the history of August in Rome into my adaptation of the poem,

1544
02:35:47,630 --> 02:35:52,400
expanding Virgil's references and one line mentions of places loaded with intrigue into scenes,

1545
02:35:52,400 --> 02:35:58,820
referencing our own understanding of magical places of the modern world and into scenes referencing the ways that Virgil's poem

1546
02:35:58,820 --> 02:36:05,180
written as imperial propaganda and travelled through centuries to influence the ways our own contemporary societies were built.

1547
02:36:06,490 --> 02:36:10,930
In The Aeneid, Virgil uses the magic of Menschen in a distinctly cartographic fashion,

1548
02:36:11,230 --> 02:36:14,860
bringing Cyrus's magic into the story without ever landing on her island.

1549
02:36:15,160 --> 02:36:23,319
Calling up book ten of the Odyssey with brevity, using a passing reference to echoing howls heard across the sea to trigger readers into categorising

1550
02:36:23,320 --> 02:36:28,030
Aeneas journey toward the rocks of Rome's future edge into something filled with magic.

1551
02:36:28,300 --> 02:36:34,300
Even if the magic doesn't happen on the page, here's a little bit of my process in converting the poem and the way that

1552
02:36:34,300 --> 02:36:38,470
Virgil referenced magical moments from Homer without actually dramatising them.

1553
02:36:38,950 --> 02:36:45,560
First, a section of book seven of The Aeneid as a message ships approaches in translation by Sarah Ruden.

1554
02:36:45,640 --> 02:36:49,240
And then the same section of the poem adapted by me into an analysis of the

1555
02:36:49,240 --> 02:36:53,230
writing of the CRC referenced by Virgil and his unofficial apprentice patient.

1556
02:36:54,320 --> 02:36:58,440
So here is a little scrap of the Aeneid book seven.

1557
02:36:58,470 --> 02:37:00,770
This is Sarah Rubin's really awesome translation.

1558
02:37:01,460 --> 02:37:08,900
There have been tons of translations of the Aeneid, obviously, but this one is really readable, really poetic, and came out in about 2008, I think.

1559
02:37:09,320 --> 02:37:15,110
So this is how we get all of the magic of Circe without having her in the action of the story.

1560
02:37:15,920 --> 02:37:20,630
Aeneas is old nurse you as well cared to in dying gave our shores your lasting bay.

1561
02:37:21,110 --> 02:37:29,060
The Great West keeps your resting place today in glory. If there's glory in a great, loyal Aeneas rendered her due rites, heaping a mound up.

1562
02:37:29,210 --> 02:37:37,490
When the sea calmed, he spread his sails unless the port behind the breezes blew past nightfall and the white moon lit up their course.

1563
02:37:37,490 --> 02:37:42,560
The gleaming surface trembled. They sailed close by the shore of Cyrus's country.

1564
02:37:42,800 --> 02:37:47,150
The sun's rich daughter makes secluded groves there resound with constant singing.

1565
02:37:47,450 --> 02:37:54,889
And in high halls at Night-Time by the fragrant Cedars, light runs her shrill shuttle through the field may leave in the late hours.

1566
02:37:54,890 --> 02:38:03,830
Growls are heard and roars of lions in hot struggles with their chains and raging screams of bristly hogs and bears and pens and howls from wolves.

1567
02:38:04,220 --> 02:38:10,940
Those hulking ships, once human, potent herbs from that fierce goddess, gave them the faces of the fur of beasts,

1568
02:38:11,180 --> 02:38:18,560
saving the blameless Trojans from these grim spells, from landing in that port on deadly shores Neptune's, and helping winds to fill their sales.

1569
02:38:18,890 --> 02:38:23,629
And they escaped beyond the foaming shallows. The sea blushed with aethereal beams.

1570
02:38:23,630 --> 02:38:27,380
Aurora showed tiny in her rosy chariot the way the debated.

1571
02:38:28,040 --> 02:38:37,189
So that's the Sarah Ruden translation of the Virgil from Latin. And this is what I did with that same moment in my scripted dramatised version,

1572
02:38:37,190 --> 02:38:42,320
kind of how this was written, how this section came to be in the poem that we know,

1573
02:38:42,620 --> 02:38:51,950
and also in the poem, the sort of alternate, messy and wiggly version that I invented to explain how something like this might have got written.

1574
02:38:52,820 --> 02:38:58,040
SFX Outside the window, the sound of the ship moving down the coastline, away from kumite towards us.

1575
02:38:58,060 --> 02:39:05,540
Diaz, Virgil and so to work. Virgil The wind propelled the Trojan ships out of the dim shade of Hades toward.

1576
02:39:06,800 --> 02:39:13,700
SFX Cilicia reads over his shoulder. A soundscape comes into being Cyrus's island, a woman singing beautifully wordlessly.

1577
02:39:14,270 --> 02:39:18,559
So Portia passed the shores of Searcy, who'd been daughter to the sun on board.

1578
02:39:18,560 --> 02:39:23,030
The sailors listened to her, singing through the Cedar Forest, calling them to come to interrupt her,

1579
02:39:23,030 --> 02:39:26,930
leaving Steve her body to breathe her scented herbs, taste her wine.

1580
02:39:28,150 --> 02:39:31,780
Why are you name checking sexy but not making her a character for a job?

1581
02:39:32,050 --> 02:39:36,130
I'd stop a minute with Sersi. Virgil Augustus is scared of witches.

1582
02:39:36,880 --> 02:39:40,000
So horses a goddess. But fine. Fine.

1583
02:39:40,630 --> 02:39:47,110
She scribbles. The soundscape returns now with roaring lions, bears, boars, howling wolves singing wordlessly.

1584
02:39:47,110 --> 02:39:49,510
Her voice twining around. So Persia.

1585
02:39:50,170 --> 02:39:56,070
Perhaps the Trojan ship might have changed its destination, but there were lions there, and the sailors could hear them growling.

1586
02:39:56,080 --> 02:40:01,659
Bears, boars and wolves. All of those creatures once men now chained and penned by Sersi,

1587
02:40:01,660 --> 02:40:07,510
avenging herself on a world in which she was seen as a witch, rich with suitors and cruel to them, too.

1588
02:40:08,200 --> 02:40:13,990
No man should land there, they knew. And so they continued understanding their own frailties, skipping that bit of the mist.

1589
02:40:14,680 --> 02:40:18,640
What do you think of that, Virgil? Virgil continues to scribble at top speed.

1590
02:40:19,450 --> 02:40:25,750
So, Pasha, what are you working on, Virgil? I'm revising the entire poem to reflect the things I learned in Hades.

1591
02:40:26,350 --> 02:40:33,489
So, peace words. No editor likes to hear. So that is how I wrangle.

1592
02:40:33,490 --> 02:40:40,299
The way that Virgil grabs the history of classical mythology, yanks it from the Homeric verse, from the Odyssey,

1593
02:40:40,300 --> 02:40:47,900
and pulls it into his Aeneid in order to help his Aeneid feel more grounded in, weirdly, both magic and reality.

1594
02:40:48,190 --> 02:40:54,849
And I decided to also ground my version of the city with my own sort of adaptation and

1595
02:40:54,850 --> 02:40:59,620
wiggling around the Latin of Virgil and the ideas that we have about sushi ourselves.

1596
02:40:59,620 --> 02:41:03,100
From a thousand years of thinking about these bits of the Odyssey.

1597
02:41:03,760 --> 02:41:08,210
How I decided to imagine why he would only just use a little bit of sexy,

1598
02:41:08,230 --> 02:41:12,670
why he would only just sort of grab it and assault his Aeneid with the kind of

1599
02:41:12,670 --> 02:41:16,360
glorious sections from the Odyssey that he chooses not to dramatise or use.

1600
02:41:17,990 --> 02:41:23,810
The magical figures of the past remain magical, even if they have over time resolved into mortals.

1601
02:41:24,380 --> 02:41:29,480
In the Aeneid, Virgil mentions Helensvale brought along from Troy as a potential marriage gift.

1602
02:41:30,080 --> 02:41:35,240
While reading it, we instantly visualise Helen and the entire Trojan War, despite the poem's beginnings.

1603
02:41:35,270 --> 02:41:36,440
After the war is over.

1604
02:41:37,340 --> 02:41:45,680
Speaking of relics and relatedly, again, to Dallas and to this whole story of the way that magic travels through time and space,

1605
02:41:46,100 --> 02:41:51,379
alongside the words of poets, alongside relics, alongside people's longing for magic to exist.

1606
02:41:51,380 --> 02:41:56,360
I mean, there's always the question of is magic less potent in the modern world than it has always been?

1607
02:41:56,360 --> 02:42:02,879
And I really don't think so. I think that it's it continues to be as vigorous and potent as it always has been.

1608
02:42:02,880 --> 02:42:04,750
And we don't just we just don't always call it magic.

1609
02:42:04,760 --> 02:42:13,430
But here's a little piece of someone this year in 2022, doing some transformation magic, using a scrap of this mythic past.

1610
02:42:13,940 --> 02:42:17,780
Back to the locational magic of the words grassy knoll as well, because it's related.

1611
02:42:18,080 --> 02:42:22,040
Kim Kardashian in 2022 wrapped a story in the form of a dress.

1612
02:42:22,220 --> 02:42:25,470
The dress worn by Marilyn Monroe to sing Happy Birthday to JFK.

1613
02:42:25,500 --> 02:42:30,680
That dress we talked about a moment ago around her own body in an act of transformative magic,

1614
02:42:30,680 --> 02:42:35,600
she garbed herself in a ghost in order to acquire that ghost's lingering status.

1615
02:42:35,870 --> 02:42:41,870
And she became a goddess with lineage in the ancient world, at least for the evening, until the next day, when everyone was like, no [INAUDIBLE].

1616
02:42:42,080 --> 02:42:48,340
Wrong, wrong, horrible that she wore this magical piece of clothing that she's not allowed to wear, because apparently she's not magical.

1617
02:42:48,350 --> 02:42:55,729
But of course, Marilyn Monroe wasn't magical either. She was also driving the lineage of goddess magic tradition to make herself into a goddess as

1618
02:42:55,730 --> 02:43:01,820
she sang Happy Birthday to the president and showed herself as a kind of self objectified icon,

1619
02:43:02,450 --> 02:43:06,019
like that fragile dress that she wore or like that durable sentence.

1620
02:43:06,020 --> 02:43:07,280
Fortune favours the bold,

1621
02:43:07,280 --> 02:43:13,940
the smallest relic or sentence can be a magician's trick to create the illusion of depths where no depth has actually been written.

1622
02:43:14,720 --> 02:43:19,910
It can create palpable magic, even in scenarios where all that's in front of us is a hotel, swimming pool,

1623
02:43:20,210 --> 02:43:25,280
or a few lines about a woman on an island in the distance and just the sound of the animals around her.

1624
02:43:26,600 --> 02:43:30,290
In this conference. We've been considering Magic's relationship to actual place.

1625
02:43:30,590 --> 02:43:35,749
But as a writer, I find that I'm especially interested in creative place and in the ways that writers have over

1626
02:43:35,750 --> 02:43:40,790
the years been able to create certainty simply by using the correct combinations of words.

1627
02:43:41,150 --> 02:43:46,550
A few words can bring us from out of these doomed carols. Tacoma, Imperial, Rome, CFC Silent.

1628
02:43:46,970 --> 02:43:55,250
It can cause a crowd to travel through time, believing the unbelievable finding themselves at home in strange places, experiencing strange wonders.

1629
02:43:56,090 --> 02:43:58,820
Homer arrives in the near through the language of Virgil,

1630
02:43:59,120 --> 02:44:04,590
who references Helen of Troy and Sarah by dropping them onto the map as his story just put printing them on there.

1631
02:44:05,510 --> 02:44:11,330
I picked them up and brought them into a piece of drama, which will no doubt accompany commuters into their lives through headphones.

1632
02:44:11,690 --> 02:44:19,070
Gods, goddesses and poets discussing the fates and singing songs about centaurs while also and Cyclops and all kinds of other monsters,

1633
02:44:19,310 --> 02:44:24,290
while also hopefully making points about the perils of being a propagandist in the year 2022.

1634
02:44:25,070 --> 02:44:30,050
Old magic mixed with new magic located on no true landscape with the landscape and story.

1635
02:44:31,170 --> 02:44:36,930
Stories. Magic in the end is that it is portable place and that it can travel among populations being

1636
02:44:36,930 --> 02:44:41,490
revised and reworked for centuries according to the needs of the people experiencing it.

1637
02:44:42,180 --> 02:44:49,830
It's a type of magic that can be carried easily through all barriers, which makes it very powerful, very bold, and very favoured by fortune.

1638
02:44:49,890 --> 02:44:58,410
No matter where you find it, I'll leave you with the final thing I did using Virgil's magic and inspiration to make something brand new of my own.

1639
02:44:58,470 --> 02:45:04,880
The beginning of an epic poem about Sappho written by soul Portia young, queer, Roman poet, not invented by me.

1640
02:45:04,890 --> 02:45:05,640
She's a real person.

1641
02:45:05,640 --> 02:45:12,660
But there's just a little bit in the historical record about her who's been charged by Augustus with getting the Aeneid out of Virgil's clutches.

1642
02:45:13,140 --> 02:45:17,730
Over the course of ten episodes. So Persia finds her own voice and makes some magic of her own,

1643
02:45:17,730 --> 02:45:22,920
using all the tools used in Virgil to write an epic poem about a heroine instead of a hero,

1644
02:45:22,920 --> 02:45:28,799
which is a poem that I completely made up out of the old magical ingredients that Virgil is using.

1645
02:45:28,800 --> 02:45:32,640
And out of Virgil. And out of the poems of Jessel.

1646
02:45:34,170 --> 02:45:40,800
I sing of a woman's arms ropes in rigging a sailor questing her journey left in the keeping of the sea.

1647
02:45:41,400 --> 02:45:45,690
Bring her to me, Aphrodite. Let this humble poet tell another poet's history.

1648
02:45:46,260 --> 02:45:51,000
Let her cling to the rocks beneath left cut cliffs. Let her change her mind about death.

1649
02:45:51,120 --> 02:45:56,430
Let this changing change the world. Let the nine muses call out to their tents.

1650
02:45:56,730 --> 02:46:00,750
Let her ship carry them as crew. Let the harpies crawl from caves.

1651
02:46:01,020 --> 02:46:05,520
Let them take to her mast as perch. Let the sirens sing from their rocks.

1652
02:46:05,520 --> 02:46:11,430
Let her sing her own song back to them. I sing of Sappho brought back from the brink.

1653
02:46:11,460 --> 02:46:17,070
A woman who sank and surfaced again, spat from the sea by Scylla, longing for a lyric of her own.

1654
02:46:17,700 --> 02:46:26,100
I sing of a suicide undone, a violet haired poet sung back to life by the states I sing of a woman's arms muscled by steering.

1655
02:46:26,490 --> 02:46:31,260
I sing of her adventures at sea, navigating tides to find desperate messages in the sand,

1656
02:46:31,590 --> 02:46:34,860
taking broken brides from their bedrooms, bringing them aboard.

1657
02:46:35,280 --> 02:46:43,170
I sing of stories carried from the ends of the earth. I sing of a sailor and of her play and pine ship built on the shores of my air.

1658
02:46:43,590 --> 02:46:48,270
I sing of her seeking a new north, a new south, a new west, a new east.

1659
02:46:48,900 --> 02:46:58,080
I sing it wonders rot by leaving home. Thank you very much for that expansive voyage of the imagination.

1660
02:46:58,590 --> 02:47:05,010
Welcome to the final lecture of the magic and the sense of Place Conference,

1661
02:47:05,280 --> 02:47:10,200
which is going to be given by the wonderful and in every good way, magical.

1662
02:47:10,200 --> 02:47:14,969
Nancy Castella I'm especially grateful to Nancy because she's bravely coming

1663
02:47:14,970 --> 02:47:19,920
to us from the other side of the world and is nevertheless kindly joining us.

1664
02:47:19,920 --> 02:47:24,420
So I'm going to ask her to start her talk with warm thanks.

1665
02:47:25,350 --> 02:47:31,650
Thank you so much, Diane, for that generous introduction and for putting together such a wonderful program for everyone.

1666
02:47:31,920 --> 02:47:42,420
So in designing this presentation, I've taken the opportunity to be somewhat more playful than I usually am with remarks at conferences.

1667
02:47:42,960 --> 02:47:46,350
Usually I stick very closely to my historical sources.

1668
02:47:47,040 --> 02:47:52,830
But recently, while learning a little bit about analyses of folk horror in modern cinema,

1669
02:47:53,250 --> 02:47:59,700
I was really struck by the strong parallels between the kinds of cultural tensions that are central to this

1670
02:47:59,700 --> 02:48:06,780
subgenre of film and those embedded in a series of medieval ghost stories from around the turn of the millennium,

1671
02:48:07,140 --> 02:48:15,570
which have long been a subject of fascination for me. So I want to begin by briefly recapping a few ideas about folk horror on screen,

1672
02:48:16,140 --> 02:48:21,690
and then I'll turn to my medieval folk horror stories centring upon ghosts or revenants.

1673
02:48:22,440 --> 02:48:29,340
My remarks on the latter will unfold as a series of analyses centring upon a series of confrontations,

1674
02:48:29,520 --> 02:48:37,140
contestations or juxtapositions that I find fruitful for my own purposes and for our theme of magic and place.

1675
02:48:37,740 --> 02:48:46,110
Those juxtapositions between the living and the dead, between paganism and Christianity, between colonisation and indigenous rebellion.

1676
02:48:46,500 --> 02:48:49,770
Past and present. And different forms of worship.

1677
02:48:50,740 --> 02:48:59,110
Then I want to close with some remarks about the frisson of pleasure that horror stories can bring in the Middle Ages as much as in the current day.

1678
02:49:00,370 --> 02:49:06,700
The genre of folk horror, in brief, relies usually upon a trope of an uncanny place,

1679
02:49:07,030 --> 02:49:13,240
nearly always rural, haunted by the trace energies of ancient beliefs and violent acts.

1680
02:49:13,720 --> 02:49:21,730
It's actually a fairly diverse genre of cinema, but for my purposes, the most interesting motif involves an outsider,

1681
02:49:22,180 --> 02:49:29,290
someone unaware of the power of these past residues that are embodied in the particular place they're visiting.

1682
02:49:30,400 --> 02:49:39,310
This outsider arrives in a picturesque rural community and encounters uncanny forces and ancient traditions that they do not understand,

1683
02:49:39,760 --> 02:49:48,610
and of which they are often initially sceptical. The ancient past that lives on in rural isolation in these films very frequently is

1684
02:49:48,610 --> 02:49:54,280
configured as pagan folk horror explored the essential strangeness of the past.

1685
02:49:54,610 --> 02:50:02,950
Presented in caricature, though a caricature, I hasten to add, that does contain a germ of historical truth pagan Europe,

1686
02:50:03,040 --> 02:50:12,130
as it slips from the past into the present and is slowly unveiled in these cinematic plots, is imagined as wholly in thrall to superstition.

1687
02:50:12,670 --> 02:50:20,559
Its capricious gods are worshipped with brutal and irrational rituals and nature, and the landscape are vaguely threatening,

1688
02:50:20,560 --> 02:50:25,870
unpredictable presences filled with primal energies just waiting to be unleashed.

1689
02:50:26,560 --> 02:50:34,390
The confrontation between the modern protagonist and the sort of zombie culture that they visit, which has somehow persisted into the present,

1690
02:50:34,870 --> 02:50:41,500
is a means of infecting a horror tale for the modern viewer that limbs the border between the familiar and the foreign.

1691
02:50:42,250 --> 02:50:49,510
I'll name only two widely known titles. A true classic of the genre is 1973 The Wicker Man,

1692
02:50:49,930 --> 02:50:57,190
in which a policeman arrives on a remote island summer isle in order to investigate the purported disappearance of a young girl,

1693
02:50:57,670 --> 02:51:02,380
only to realise, to his horror that all the inhabitants are devout pagans.

1694
02:51:03,070 --> 02:51:11,260
In the end, he discovers that the girl still is living and that he has in fact been lured there in order to serve as a sacrifice to the pagan gods.

1695
02:51:12,070 --> 02:51:18,190
The more recent American film Midsommar from 2019 uses a somewhat similar conceit.

1696
02:51:18,880 --> 02:51:25,420
A group of outsiders are lured to a pagan community in Sweden, only for most of them to meet a savage end,

1697
02:51:25,870 --> 02:51:30,790
with the exception of the female protagonist who ends up going native, so to speak,

1698
02:51:31,060 --> 02:51:35,950
as the honoured may queen who presides over some of these macabre events.

1699
02:51:36,760 --> 02:51:42,130
Significantly, both films end with a scene of pagan ritual, a birth sacrifice.

1700
02:51:42,700 --> 02:51:48,610
And I'm going to show just about a slightly longer than one minute clip of the ending of The Wicker Man.

1701
02:51:48,790 --> 02:51:50,500
Probably many of you have seen it,

1702
02:51:50,860 --> 02:52:01,120
but I just sort of wanted to show the visual of this cheerful group of pagans singing a medieval song as they incinerate this policeman.

1703
02:52:25,800 --> 02:52:35,750
So. Some say.

1704
02:52:49,810 --> 02:53:04,090
She? Oh.

1705
02:53:12,820 --> 02:53:17,229
Oh. Okay.

1706
02:53:17,230 --> 02:53:23,590
So that's our ending to this really quite wonderful classic folk horror film.

1707
02:53:24,010 --> 02:53:31,089
And it's really highlighting this confrontation between the sacrifices, Christian faith and again,

1708
02:53:31,090 --> 02:53:36,430
this cheery group of pagans who are emulating him in order to procure a good harvest.

1709
02:53:37,240 --> 02:53:42,040
Now, I am not a film historian or critic by any stretch of the imagination,

1710
02:53:42,550 --> 02:53:48,310
but some of the ideas that have been floated to analyse folk horror strike me as quite fruitful

1711
02:53:48,610 --> 02:53:54,160
for understanding some uncanny stories from my own field of medieval history as well.

1712
02:53:54,640 --> 02:53:59,170
So I believe these two types of storytelling enter into an interesting dialogue.

1713
02:53:59,890 --> 02:54:04,750
There are three analytic ideas I want to introduce which all build upon one another.

1714
02:54:05,290 --> 02:54:13,720
The first two derive from a series of lectures delivered by Shocked Derrida at the University of California Riverside in 1993.

1715
02:54:14,530 --> 02:54:21,940
Francis Fukuyama had recently declared the end of history and the final triumph of liberal democracy for all time.

1716
02:54:22,240 --> 02:54:25,390
Clearly not a prediction that has come true very well.

1717
02:54:26,110 --> 02:54:34,960
Gary Dodds lectures at the time respond to this, suggesting that reports of the death of Marxism and of communism were belied by persistent

1718
02:54:34,970 --> 02:54:40,540
spectres of Marx that continued to haunt contemporary debates and political understandings.

1719
02:54:41,380 --> 02:54:47,350
Some of their ideas, language and ideas have since been lifted entirely out of this original context and applied

1720
02:54:47,350 --> 02:54:51,250
to the radically different world of folk horror where they tend to work quite well.

1721
02:54:52,120 --> 02:54:57,099
The first notion I want to highlight derives from a series of reflections Derrida makes upon

1722
02:54:57,100 --> 02:55:02,760
the impossibility of the present rupturing free from the past from which it has sprung.

1723
02:55:03,730 --> 02:55:06,190
The past continually intrudes into the present,

1724
02:55:06,490 --> 02:55:13,270
a slippage that Dairy Don capitulates with the notion that time is perennially moving out of joint or off its hinges.

1725
02:55:13,900 --> 02:55:20,740
In short, the past haunts the present like a ghost whose traces are evidence, even when its materiality is gone.

1726
02:55:21,610 --> 02:55:25,120
Time unhinged is itself from its presumed linear unfurling.

1727
02:55:25,450 --> 02:55:33,040
In order to circle back to oscillate between moments of now and before, the present itself is a sort of double vision.

1728
02:55:33,670 --> 02:55:39,010
The persistence of a culture of presumed long dead in a rural pocket, seldom seen by outsiders,

1729
02:55:39,640 --> 02:55:43,600
becomes the basis for this sort of unhinged time in folk horror cinema.

1730
02:55:44,600 --> 02:55:55,400
A second complementary element to this is upon dairy introduces suggesting that he wishes to present an ontology which is a play on the word ontology.

1731
02:55:56,180 --> 02:56:01,370
A ontology seeks out the effectivity and presence, as he phrases it,

1732
02:56:01,700 --> 02:56:07,430
of the spectral of the inherited past and its unseen structure ation of the present moment.

1733
02:56:08,150 --> 02:56:13,790
A ontology traces the obscured and deliberately occult and residue of the past ghosts,

1734
02:56:14,120 --> 02:56:19,010
thus making visible, as it were, their power to condition our present forms of existence.

1735
02:56:19,820 --> 02:56:26,720
Moreover, ontology, according to Derrida, quote, harbours within itself eschatology and teleology.

1736
02:56:27,380 --> 02:56:31,280
That is to say, a haunt, a logical approach compresses all of time,

1737
02:56:31,670 --> 02:56:35,749
rooting the present in the persistence of past spectres and seeing the future

1738
02:56:35,750 --> 02:56:41,410
spring in turn from our past dependent present within the realm of folk horror,

1739
02:56:41,420 --> 02:56:44,210
we see this collision of temporality quite clearly,

1740
02:56:44,540 --> 02:56:51,260
the present conjured from a ontology of a fragmented past and often gesturing towards an apocalyptic outcome.

1741
02:56:51,710 --> 02:56:53,600
This is a central tension in the genre.

1742
02:56:54,700 --> 02:57:03,790
Finally, Derry Dodd's reflections have also been paired with a word popularised by the 1950s Situationist guy de Boer, that of Psychogeography.

1743
02:57:04,510 --> 02:57:09,520
As with Derrida's ideas, this coinage has been adapted quite a bit in intervening decades.

1744
02:57:10,030 --> 02:57:17,109
For my purposes, Psychogeography references the ways in which emotional charges and psychic residues are

1745
02:57:17,110 --> 02:57:23,170
perceived as embedded within the material culture of a place in the world of folk horror,

1746
02:57:23,560 --> 02:57:24,219
violence,

1747
02:57:24,220 --> 02:57:34,510
ritual superstition and pagan belief leave traces sometimes invisibly but always nonetheless discernibly in the make up of the physical world itself.

1748
02:57:35,320 --> 02:57:39,430
This includes both elements of the natural landscape as well as human structures.

1749
02:57:40,210 --> 02:57:45,220
These trace energies may be barely perceptible at a conscious level, but they exert force.

1750
02:57:45,610 --> 02:57:54,339
They affect the psyche of inhabitants and visitors alike, exerting a kind of unseen magnetism upon thoughts and behaviours to navigate.

1751
02:57:54,340 --> 02:58:01,749
The psycho geographical world of folk horror is constantly to sense subtle traces of ancient savagery and hauntings made present

1752
02:58:01,750 --> 02:58:10,360
by time out of joint uncanny indicators that modernity is deeply compromised by the haunting weight of an ever present past.

1753
02:58:11,350 --> 02:58:14,079
The layering of these ideas adds up, I believe,

1754
02:58:14,080 --> 02:58:22,720
to something like a theory of magic and place time that continually expands and contracts, folding it upon itself like a pleated garment.

1755
02:58:23,440 --> 02:58:25,329
Spectral presence is from the past,

1756
02:58:25,330 --> 02:58:33,610
but quietly enchanted the present place places imbued with invisible energies and emotional residues that exert a pull upon the visible world.

1757
02:58:34,480 --> 02:58:40,840
But magical or not, it is, in fact, the precision and specificity of these ideas that makes them useful.

1758
02:58:40,960 --> 02:58:43,090
When applied to my medieval ghost stories.

1759
02:58:43,840 --> 02:58:53,650
I've long been fascinated by a series of stories about embodied hauntings bound in deep ma of Myers-Briggs Chronican penned between 1013 and 1018.

1760
02:58:54,770 --> 02:59:01,730
Pete Mars, Ghost or Revenant Stories are one of the richest and most fascinating collections of Mccolm tales in any medieval text.

1761
02:59:02,300 --> 02:59:06,440
His work provides an excellent window onto the issues of how the newly imported

1762
02:59:06,440 --> 02:59:11,480
religion of Christianity was interacting with older afterlife beliefs in his region.

1763
02:59:12,460 --> 02:59:18,040
Like the folk horror films of the modern screen, The Hauntings and Deep Mars tale involve, quote unquote,

1764
02:59:18,040 --> 02:59:24,849
modern protagonists visiting places of ancient power that preserve the traces of an uncanny pagan

1765
02:59:24,850 --> 02:59:31,450
culture and its rituals that were associated very deeply with episodes of past violence and slaughter.

1766
02:59:32,230 --> 02:59:41,920
Though these tales were recorded in what is now to us, a distant past, they convey a similar frisson of delightful dread to modern horror films,

1767
02:59:42,220 --> 02:59:46,750
a fear that the veneer of the modern and enlightened present might be overtaken by the

1768
02:59:46,750 --> 02:59:51,910
dangerous traces of a superstitious past that literally in here is in the landscape itself.

1769
02:59:52,480 --> 02:59:58,090
Of course, paganism was also a far more recent spectre in Mars time.

1770
02:59:58,390 --> 03:00:01,960
Indeed, not quite a spectre at all, but a still living religion,

1771
03:00:02,080 --> 03:00:06,940
albeit one that had been losing ground to the encroachments of Christian hegemony for some time.

1772
03:00:07,630 --> 03:00:15,220
Theodore Mars served as a bishop in a place the far eastern frontier of Christendom, at the edge of pagan Slav communities,

1773
03:00:15,520 --> 03:00:23,410
and a time the ten teens in which the Christian church still was actively evangelising a mixed population.

1774
03:00:23,950 --> 03:00:27,070
So I have a couple of maps here that I'm just going to pause to introduce.

1775
03:00:27,400 --> 03:00:31,000
First one is showing you in the sort of purple blue area,

1776
03:00:31,270 --> 03:00:39,430
the central core of power of the are Tony and emperors who are the people that Itamar is serving.

1777
03:00:39,940 --> 03:00:45,579
And then this sort of striped area that I've just circled is the area that they're

1778
03:00:45,580 --> 03:00:52,330
trying to expand into and christianise and politically control this region.

1779
03:00:52,330 --> 03:01:00,730
But it's still highly contested. And then our next map is a sort of close up of that same region.

1780
03:01:01,240 --> 03:01:07,600
And I'm going to circle here a couple of different towns that are going to be mentioned in my presentation.

1781
03:01:07,960 --> 03:01:14,320
Mirza Burg to the south, which is circled in a slightly lighter colour, is the origin of our informant.

1782
03:01:14,320 --> 03:01:19,150
Eat more of mirzapur. He spent some time in Magdeburg and I'm going to refer to that.

1783
03:01:19,510 --> 03:01:28,030
And then I'm going to talk about two ghost stories, one that involves Laban and the other more important one that endeavoured to set a story.

1784
03:01:28,030 --> 03:01:33,100
And I have to have a map, right? So in this region, Christianity was young.

1785
03:01:33,580 --> 03:01:36,700
Yet the world beat Ma believed was growing old.

1786
03:01:37,360 --> 03:01:43,290
The Imperial Dynasty that beat more served following in the footsteps of all the previous generations of his family,

1787
03:01:43,630 --> 03:01:47,590
consciously perceived itself as fulfilling an important apocalyptic role.

1788
03:01:48,370 --> 03:01:52,180
These rulers, known as the Ottomans, ruling around the turn of the millennium,

1789
03:01:52,570 --> 03:01:58,600
consciously modelled themselves in accordance with a seventh century prophecy known as the Last World Emperor.

1790
03:01:59,320 --> 03:02:05,320
The text of this prophecy foretold the rise of a righteous Christian emperor in the last days of the world.

1791
03:02:06,040 --> 03:02:11,680
This warrior for God would defeat paganism and extend the faith to the limits of the known world,

1792
03:02:12,070 --> 03:02:17,110
thus symbolically overcoming the forces of apocalyptic evil described in the Book of Revelation.

1793
03:02:18,010 --> 03:02:22,000
Once world conquered a peace had been achieved. According to this prophecy,

1794
03:02:22,390 --> 03:02:27,520
this last world emperor would travel to Jerusalem in order to greet Jesus at the

1795
03:02:27,520 --> 03:02:32,080
time of his second coming as he descended from the heavens to the Mount of Olives.

1796
03:02:32,980 --> 03:02:42,700
The last world emperor would then personally hand over to Lord Jesus His Crown and surrender to Him dominion over an entirely christianised earth.

1797
03:02:43,480 --> 03:02:49,900
The Crown was designed both to display their earthly glory as emperors and also

1798
03:02:49,990 --> 03:02:54,940
kind of hilariously to be a fitting gift for the Lord Jesus in this scenario.

1799
03:02:55,360 --> 03:03:02,080
So this is literally the crown that the atoning emperors hoped to give Jesus on the Mount of Olives.

1800
03:03:03,110 --> 03:03:06,200
To return to our specific context. They are, Tony.

1801
03:03:06,200 --> 03:03:15,320
An expansion across the Elk River and subsequent attempt at subduing Slavic paganism was regarded as a struggle with apocalyptic dimensions.

1802
03:03:16,070 --> 03:03:24,920
Now themes are Informant begins his series of tales with a story about a congregation of ghosts who were discovered to be inhabiting a once deep,

1803
03:03:24,920 --> 03:03:35,030
consecrated church in the town of Val Sladen. From the vantage point of his time, the story was already nearly a century old in the year 929.

1804
03:03:35,420 --> 03:03:41,870
The town obviously then had been attacked without warning by a force of pagan rebels against Etonian hegemony,

1805
03:03:42,260 --> 03:03:45,080
and most of the population were brutally slaughtered.

1806
03:03:46,020 --> 03:03:54,360
Ball 11 was one of a series of fortified towns across the Elk River, protecting the Northeastern marches of the expanding autonomy and realm.

1807
03:03:55,020 --> 03:04:01,860
Thus, German power structures were being established in lands that were pagan, in religion and Slavic and ethnicity and culture.

1808
03:04:02,520 --> 03:04:09,360
The mass killing at Val Slavin was an act of revolt by pagan Slavic forces resisting this colonisation and acculturation.

1809
03:04:09,720 --> 03:04:14,280
And as we know, all good. Those stories must spring from an act of violence.

1810
03:04:15,210 --> 03:04:20,160
In deep Mars story, a living priest is assigned to the parish of all Slavin,

1811
03:04:20,550 --> 03:04:25,170
and there encounters a congregation of ghosts occupying the church at night.

1812
03:04:26,070 --> 03:04:29,880
He is terrified when he sees them, but approaches the building nonetheless.

1813
03:04:30,480 --> 03:04:34,230
Then he is accosted by one of them, a woman whom he had known in life.

1814
03:04:34,950 --> 03:04:39,210
She predicts his coming death, and he does indeed perish soon thereafter.

1815
03:04:39,990 --> 03:04:45,930
So far, so creepy. The implication is that the violent history of massacre of Christians in this region,

1816
03:04:46,320 --> 03:04:53,730
combined with the fact that the church had once become consecrated, have given a toehold to the dead to persist in haunting it.

1817
03:04:54,670 --> 03:04:58,210
The psycho geographical residue of pagan Christian violence,

1818
03:04:58,480 --> 03:05:06,370
combined with the vulnerability of the sacred building to haunting incursions by the dead, seem like classic folk horror themes medieval style.

1819
03:05:07,180 --> 03:05:14,890
The dead, though ostensibly peaceful in this story, project a nonetheless a definite aura of menace and terror.

1820
03:05:16,220 --> 03:05:22,550
This motif was repeated with important variations in a series of other narratives presented in Deep Mars Chronicle.

1821
03:05:23,180 --> 03:05:30,830
He continues, for example, by sharing a story of the dead glimpsed from afar, conducting a mass at night in a church in Magdeburg.

1822
03:05:31,580 --> 03:05:36,530
There follows another account of his own rather disappointing personal experience of the dead.

1823
03:05:36,950 --> 03:05:39,950
He once heard grunting noises coming from a cemetery.

1824
03:05:40,850 --> 03:05:49,550
Eventually, however, Pete Ma builds to his grand conclusion a horror story that had been shared with him by his niece, a Christian abbess.

1825
03:05:50,810 --> 03:06:00,470
This tale is similar in many ways to the vastly been one, but quite stunning in one divergence that renders its interpretation entirely different.

1826
03:06:01,370 --> 03:06:07,760
Once again, we have a town that had previously been the scene of a pagan rebellion, destruction and mass slaughter,

1827
03:06:08,330 --> 03:06:15,980
a place involving a once deep, consecrated church inhabited by the animate dead, and a priest who meets an untimely end.

1828
03:06:16,850 --> 03:06:21,590
All these elements are presented even more intensely, however, in this new story.

1829
03:06:22,280 --> 03:06:29,120
It's set in the town of Devon Tura much farther west. The tale was roughly contemporary to that in Wealth Slave.

1830
03:06:29,600 --> 03:06:34,550
It can be dated also to the 10th century because of a bishop who was mentioned by name.

1831
03:06:35,520 --> 03:06:42,990
Let's begin with the fact that this was yet another place haunted by a bloody history of pagan resistance to Christian hegemony,

1832
03:06:43,380 --> 03:06:49,290
one that left behind a significantly freighted memory of violence, slaughter and brutal retribution.

1833
03:06:50,260 --> 03:06:55,450
Devon tours like Boss Lehmann once had been devastated by Pagan forces rebelling

1834
03:06:55,450 --> 03:06:58,930
against the expansion of the Christian religion and its political backers.

1835
03:06:59,650 --> 03:07:04,389
Our backstory, however, begins earlier in the seven seventies, soon after,

1836
03:07:04,390 --> 03:07:08,980
the Emperor Charlemagne claimed Suzerainty over this region of Western Saxony

1837
03:07:09,190 --> 03:07:13,390
in a bid to expand his political influence as well as the Christian religion.

1838
03:07:13,810 --> 03:07:18,220
So this is a much earlier generation and a different imperial dynasty,

1839
03:07:18,520 --> 03:07:25,540
engaging in very similar processes of expanding political and Christian hegemony into a pagan region.

1840
03:07:26,200 --> 03:07:34,750
These two goals work together, of course. Religious acculturation was understood as a means of undermining indigenous solidarity and resistance,

1841
03:07:35,080 --> 03:07:40,600
while acceptance of Christianity would make the overlordship of Frankish neighbours more palatable.

1842
03:07:41,620 --> 03:07:50,050
However, in 772, the Christian settlement that Charlemagne had established in Devon Tower was attacked in a bloody pagan revolt.

1843
03:07:50,680 --> 03:07:54,579
The local church was destroyed, and the families of Frankish aristocrats,

1844
03:07:54,580 --> 03:08:02,080
whom Charlemagne had settled as loyal Christian colonists, administrators and missionaries in this area were slaughtered en masse.

1845
03:08:03,110 --> 03:08:04,159
In retaliation.

1846
03:08:04,160 --> 03:08:13,040
Charlemagne in thief Mars time, a much revered figure already Charlemagne declared all out war on the recalcitrant pagan Saxons of this region.

1847
03:08:14,120 --> 03:08:15,890
That year or possibly the next.

1848
03:08:16,250 --> 03:08:24,920
He destroyed an important airman soul that is a living sacred pagan tree or possibly an upright pole symbolising such a tree.

1849
03:08:24,950 --> 03:08:32,300
But this is a very important pagan cult object, as Charlemagne's wars against the rebelling pagan forces continued successfully.

1850
03:08:32,690 --> 03:08:42,110
He eventually demanded in peace negotiations held in 782, that 4500 pagan rebels should be handed over to him for justice.

1851
03:08:43,010 --> 03:08:48,650
Charlemagne then had all of them beheaded on the same day, an event known as the Massacre of Verdun,

1852
03:08:48,980 --> 03:08:52,580
and one that even Christian chroniclers recounted with some ambivalence.

1853
03:08:53,300 --> 03:08:57,980
While medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when it comes to accurate counting,

1854
03:08:58,370 --> 03:09:04,370
it appears that the number of men killed was significant enough to make a strong impression upon contemporaries.

1855
03:09:05,560 --> 03:09:10,990
This background of violence and counter-violence inevitably informs the reader's psycho geographical

1856
03:09:10,990 --> 03:09:17,890
understanding of Deventer as a location for a confrontation between the living and dead pagans and Christians.

1857
03:09:18,850 --> 03:09:26,350
This time, I prefer to read my own translation of Ma's words, which he in turn attributes to his niece, Brigitte, his informant.

1858
03:09:27,160 --> 03:09:34,510
And I'm going to put up this slide purely for atmosphere, though it's not actually an illustration of the particular story I'm going to tell.

1859
03:09:34,810 --> 03:09:39,010
This is a different story motif called the Grateful Dead,

1860
03:09:39,010 --> 03:09:46,690
in which a man who always prays for the Dead is protected by them when he's chased by some enemies into a churchyard.

1861
03:09:47,050 --> 03:09:56,650
But the sort of visual here of the dead rising up and pouring out of the church door, I think kind of presents a good visual for the story.

1862
03:09:58,650 --> 03:10:04,530
So again, to return to the original source, this is Mars, and he's talking to him.

1863
03:10:05,500 --> 03:10:11,440
During the 80 years or more when that great man Baldrick held the Holy See of Utrecht,

1864
03:10:11,650 --> 03:10:20,700
and that would date this to around 918 to 975, he renovated a church that had fallen into ruin in a place called it Devon Tower.

1865
03:10:21,430 --> 03:10:25,030
He consecrated it and commended it to the care of one of his priests.

1866
03:10:26,130 --> 03:10:33,860
One day when the priest was going to church very early in the morning, he saw a dead people in the church and in the cemetery making offerings.

1867
03:10:34,080 --> 03:10:38,590
And he heard them singing. The priest informed the bishop immediately.

1868
03:10:39,130 --> 03:10:41,560
The latter commanded him to sleep in the church.

1869
03:10:42,190 --> 03:10:48,370
But on the next night the priest was thrown out of the church by the dead folk, along with the bedding he lay upon.

1870
03:10:49,090 --> 03:10:52,270
Terrified, the priest again complained to his superior.

1871
03:10:52,990 --> 03:10:59,230
However, the bishop ordered that he should bless himself with the relics of saints and be dispersed with holy water,

1872
03:10:59,440 --> 03:11:02,320
but that on no account should he stop guarding the church.

1873
03:11:03,250 --> 03:11:09,880
The priest, obedient to his bishop's command, tried to sleep in the church again, but he was struck with terror.

1874
03:11:10,150 --> 03:11:17,800
And so lay wide awake and watchful. And lo and behold, at the accustomed hour, the dead arrived.

1875
03:11:18,490 --> 03:11:26,970
They picked him up. They placed him upon the altar and they incinerated his body with flames down to a fine ash.

1876
03:11:27,980 --> 03:11:31,910
As day is to the living. So night is conceded to the dead.

1877
03:11:33,560 --> 03:11:40,040
This tale of devoutly murderous revenants raises many more questions than the boss labelled one.

1878
03:11:40,700 --> 03:11:48,770
I find intimations here of three distinct models or layers for conceptualising how the dead and the living co-existed.

1879
03:11:49,960 --> 03:11:52,140
First, the explicit rationale Ft.

1880
03:11:52,150 --> 03:12:00,400
Moore offers for his ghost stories in general is, quote, so that no one faithful to Christ may doubt the future resurrection of the dead.

1881
03:12:01,470 --> 03:12:05,070
This is a recurrent refrain in his account of these stories.

1882
03:12:05,520 --> 03:12:08,730
He introduces the section of Ghost Tales with this preface.

1883
03:12:09,510 --> 03:12:14,850
He then returns to the theme of resurrection again in the middle, citing some biblical passages.

1884
03:12:15,300 --> 03:12:21,360
And finally, he closes his whole series with an even more specific invocation of the population

1885
03:12:21,360 --> 03:12:25,320
group he believes needs to learn a lesson about Christian resurrection.

1886
03:12:26,600 --> 03:12:34,190
Quote, I speak to the unlearned and most especially to the slobs who believe that everything finishes with temporal death.

1887
03:12:34,940 --> 03:12:41,000
I am firmly indicating the certainty of our future resurrection and recompense according to merits.

1888
03:12:42,100 --> 03:12:50,200
Thus Demara as someone charged with pastoral responsibilities of the geographic limit of Christendom and at the temporal brink of the Eschaton,

1889
03:12:50,620 --> 03:12:56,800
finds these tales appealing for the purpose of teaching pagan Slavs about the resurrection for the Bishop.

1890
03:12:57,160 --> 03:13:01,930
The moving animate cadavers of these dead folk provide a pattern of possibility,

1891
03:13:02,590 --> 03:13:07,420
proof that the mortal coil may transcend corruption, rise and live again.

1892
03:13:08,290 --> 03:13:13,660
If there were local rumours going around about living corpses who gather together in community,

1893
03:13:13,930 --> 03:13:19,720
then perhaps it was only a small leap to persuade people in this region of the promise of resurrection.

1894
03:13:20,970 --> 03:13:25,800
Thus, in line with my theme of focus, our time here is once again off its hinges.

1895
03:13:26,670 --> 03:13:31,409
The past episodes of pagan Christian violence that give uncanny properties to these

1896
03:13:31,410 --> 03:13:37,260
particular places not only collapses into the present modernity of our hapless priest,

1897
03:13:37,830 --> 03:13:44,220
but also gestures towards the eschaton as the atoning kings prepare to conquer the world for Christianity.

1898
03:13:44,550 --> 03:13:51,660
These places of conflict seem to have resisted, almost in spite of themselves, the claiming of territory for Christian hegemony.

1899
03:13:52,320 --> 03:13:59,190
A haunting, logical reading foregrounds the persistence of the spectre of paganism in an ever more Christian world.

1900
03:13:59,700 --> 03:14:02,670
Yet the Mars proposition also is quite illogical.

1901
03:14:03,180 --> 03:14:08,280
The doctrine of general resurrection occupies a specific role within the unfolding of an apocalyptic,

1902
03:14:08,280 --> 03:14:11,430
universal history and the process of human salvation.

1903
03:14:11,760 --> 03:14:16,080
It hardly is proven by contemporary folk horror stories about the living dead.

1904
03:14:16,860 --> 03:14:20,620
Even if the Mark believed himself currently to be living in the end times.

1905
03:14:20,910 --> 03:14:25,500
His argument still is strikingly incoherent. Above all, however,

1906
03:14:25,860 --> 03:14:30,450
the gruesome murder of the priest by these dead folk obstructs any transparent

1907
03:14:30,450 --> 03:14:35,250
understanding of them as symbols for the most exalted mystery of the Christian faith.

1908
03:14:36,160 --> 03:14:42,250
In yet another collapse of time and place, these dead folk holding mass may look like pious Christians,

1909
03:14:42,700 --> 03:14:46,030
but in fact they act much more like the pagan dead.

1910
03:14:47,100 --> 03:14:52,530
Indeed, I would posit that the story itself is a hybrid formation that preserves,

1911
03:14:52,530 --> 03:14:58,920
at its core an old pagan idea about the dead forming complex communities in close parallel to the living.

1912
03:14:59,340 --> 03:15:04,470
A formulation that's hinted at with the closing lines of the story as day is to the living.

1913
03:15:04,860 --> 03:15:13,480
So night is conceded to the dead. The dead have special rights to certain places after dark while the living have these rights during daylight.

1914
03:15:14,110 --> 03:15:18,790
The dead have a free hold on this once consecrated church during Night-Time hours

1915
03:15:19,000 --> 03:15:23,710
and resent the intrusion of the living man into their own place during their time.

1916
03:15:24,400 --> 03:15:29,110
Time thus is doubled. Other details are likewise revelatory.

1917
03:15:29,650 --> 03:15:37,120
For example, the fact that in both Pete Marr's tales about dead congregations, the deceased parishioners give offerings to their priest.

1918
03:15:37,810 --> 03:15:39,970
This presents an intriguing opening.

1919
03:15:40,600 --> 03:15:47,830
Offerings were small tokens given directly to clergy in addition to the tithe in order to support miscellaneous parish expenses.

1920
03:15:48,490 --> 03:15:53,860
Thus, the presence of offerings in these stories suggests that these dead people possessed material wealth,

1921
03:15:54,370 --> 03:16:01,630
which they in turn share with their dead clergymen. They must then have other occupations beyond the mass at which they are glimpsed

1922
03:16:01,840 --> 03:16:06,910
that involve possessions and wealth and other such aspects of daily existence.

1923
03:16:07,780 --> 03:16:12,160
Such glimmers of a fuller, post-mortem society put the life and afterlife.

1924
03:16:12,610 --> 03:16:18,370
These revenants had social differentiations, customs, private property and an economy of exchange.

1925
03:16:19,120 --> 03:16:22,300
I don't have time here to present some other texts for comparison,

1926
03:16:22,810 --> 03:16:28,060
but several medieval chroniclers do include elaborate discussions of such post-mortem existences.

1927
03:16:28,780 --> 03:16:34,000
My personal favourite does arrived in the same region as the more, albeit from a late later century.

1928
03:16:34,600 --> 03:16:39,460
It envisions a group of the dead inhabiting a mountain where they sell and reap in the fields,

1929
03:16:39,730 --> 03:16:45,730
find partners and marry, set up households together, and most intriguingly, give birth to children.

1930
03:16:46,450 --> 03:16:51,610
The dead in this vision have fully realised afterlives extending even to fecundity.

1931
03:16:52,120 --> 03:16:57,670
Their numbers are replenished not only by new deaths, but by giving birth to living dead infants.

1932
03:16:58,670 --> 03:17:02,299
Beyond questions about the life of the dead and their claims to place in time.

1933
03:17:02,300 --> 03:17:08,630
However deep. Maurice Devin ter revenants pose a question that is not inherent to his other ghost stories.

1934
03:17:09,410 --> 03:17:13,730
For these dead surely do not behave as good Christian dead ought to do.

1935
03:17:14,420 --> 03:17:21,560
Indeed, the rapidity with which they turn from prayer to slaughter is at first glance puzzling.

1936
03:17:22,280 --> 03:17:27,320
Unless, of course, worship and killing were the same thing for this congregation of cadavers.

1937
03:17:28,040 --> 03:17:32,060
How are we to understand the religious rites of these revenants?

1938
03:17:33,280 --> 03:17:41,890
The best point of entry for exploring this question lies in the details of precisely where and how the dead folk heal the living priest,

1939
03:17:42,820 --> 03:17:49,840
according to TMR, in a detail that only an omniscient narrator could relate for, there were no surviving witnesses of that night.

1940
03:17:50,590 --> 03:17:56,020
The community of the dead went to some trouble to kill the priest in a specific part of the church.

1941
03:17:57,030 --> 03:18:03,659
They did not set upon him as he lay upon his pallet, but picked him up bodily and transported him to the spot.

1942
03:18:03,660 --> 03:18:14,550
Best suited for their intent. The alter. Likewise, they killed the priest in a specific way, incinerating his body with flames down to a fine ash.

1943
03:18:15,450 --> 03:18:23,430
In short, the revenants lay the priest upon the high place of sacrifice, and there immolated him flesh and bones until nothing remained.

1944
03:18:24,330 --> 03:18:31,710
Pete Mar's dead folk, in other words, enacted a traditionally pagan form of worship by making of the living priest a burden.

1945
03:18:31,740 --> 03:18:39,800
Offering a sacrificial victim reduced to nothingness and rendered as incense for the delectation of the ancestors and the gods.

1946
03:18:40,810 --> 03:18:47,110
Both human sacrifice and specifically burnt offerings have long been associated with Northern European paganism,

1947
03:18:47,590 --> 03:18:50,860
a custom that's attested in classical barbarian ethnography,

1948
03:18:50,890 --> 03:18:57,910
including Caesar's Gallic war, which is the origin of the custom inspiring the film The Wicker Man and in Charlemagne Saxon.

1949
03:18:58,960 --> 03:19:02,530
And in chroniclers such as Adam of Bremen, among many others.

1950
03:19:03,220 --> 03:19:07,959
First sacrifice was offered to gods, two ancestors or both for centuries, as.

1951
03:19:07,960 --> 03:19:11,260
As an expression of worship and solidarity beyond the grave.

1952
03:19:11,530 --> 03:19:14,800
Until Christianisation eliminated the practice piecemeal.

1953
03:19:15,400 --> 03:19:20,800
Indeed, more himself, a mere three paragraphs after concluding his horrifying story,

1954
03:19:21,250 --> 03:19:25,840
saw fit to explain this pagan custom of burnt sacrifice in some detail.

1955
03:19:26,450 --> 03:19:36,190
But every nine years, the Slavs gather and offer to their gods a burnt offering of 99 men and an equal number of dogs and cocks and hawks.

1956
03:19:36,820 --> 03:19:41,560
They believed with certainty that these sacrifices would serve the dead below.

1957
03:19:42,700 --> 03:19:50,350
It is striking that so soon after describing dead folk, bringing a living man to an altar and incinerating his body to ash,

1958
03:19:50,590 --> 03:19:58,360
that deep marsh would offer this description of burnt offerings and human sacrifice as the distinctively pagan, sacral rite of the region.

1959
03:19:59,260 --> 03:20:01,420
The connections hardly can have been lost on him.

1960
03:20:02,140 --> 03:20:11,050
Thus, the crafting of deep Mars omniscient narration around the sacrifice of a man on the altar down to a fine ash seems to me highly suggestive.

1961
03:20:11,710 --> 03:20:20,230
It alerts us to the fact that this folktale about the living dead is not fully or self-evidently comprehensible within a Christian frame of reference.

1962
03:20:20,950 --> 03:20:26,830
Indeed, these dead worshippers are portrayed more in keeping with pagan rather than Christian norms.

1963
03:20:27,700 --> 03:20:34,960
Thus, while the death of the priest in deep Mars first story from Baal Slavin is just passively foretold by the dead,

1964
03:20:35,290 --> 03:20:41,080
the Devon Tall tale involves a more active role for the dead in bringing about the priest's demise.

1965
03:20:42,120 --> 03:20:51,120
Thus the vastly bien version seems to be more intensified form of the same tale, more frank in its invocation of horror and of a restless past.

1966
03:20:52,660 --> 03:21:00,280
I won't conclude with a detailed re encapsulation of how medieval stories about the Restless Dead function as an early form of folk horror.

1967
03:21:00,910 --> 03:21:05,560
The congruence is or plain, and I already have laid for some thoughts as I've gone along.

1968
03:21:06,280 --> 03:21:09,969
What I'd like to do instead is pose a challenge to historians,

1969
03:21:09,970 --> 03:21:16,390
and I include myself here who deal with sources in the general idiom that deals with horror and the uncanny.

1970
03:21:17,230 --> 03:21:23,740
We have a tendency to take our sources quite seriously to see them primarily as insights into religion and conversion,

1971
03:21:24,100 --> 03:21:30,880
culture and colonialism, states and so forth. And certainly these are reasonable ways to approach such material.

1972
03:21:31,630 --> 03:21:38,260
Yet I think the comparison with Modern Folk Horror unveils a dimension of these stories that we tend to overlook.

1973
03:21:38,800 --> 03:21:42,220
The emotional appeal of sheer, shivering pleasure.

1974
03:21:43,220 --> 03:21:49,850
Horror stories understood primarily as horrific, not as religion or as something else are not a new invention.

1975
03:21:50,240 --> 03:21:54,200
Nor is the interest in them due to a peculiarly modern sensibility.

1976
03:21:54,830 --> 03:21:58,610
Well, Pete Mars Revenants tell us about serious historical processes.

1977
03:21:58,880 --> 03:22:05,840
They also, I believe, speak to the perennial pleasures of the uncanny of frightful and unexpected encounters.

1978
03:22:06,380 --> 03:22:09,920
For many hearers of these tales in the 11th century as now,

1979
03:22:10,280 --> 03:22:18,890
their appeal lies in the delicious sense of having suddenly wandered into an alternative time and place where menace and magic collide.

1980
03:22:20,100 --> 03:22:23,370
Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you.

1981
03:22:23,370 --> 03:22:35,760
From all of us for engrossing us with so many chilling and wonderful stories that I thought connected.

1982
03:22:37,040 --> 03:22:42,800
Wonderfully with much that's been said and discussed in the course of this event.

1983
03:22:43,130 --> 03:22:48,770
Thank you all and continue to be as awesome as you've all been over the past three days.

1984
03:22:49,070 --> 03:22:51,270
Thank you. Over and out.