It is brilliant to welcome everyone to the third day of the magic and the sense of place conference.
So Alice Huxley is a doctoral student in her third year at Oxford University at Saint John's College,
researching the relationship between folklore and literature and place across the 18th and 19th centuries.
And she's going to be talking to us about 18th century fairies in Kensington Gardens before Barry.
So I hand over now to the first panellist Alice Huxley.
Thank you very much for being here. If you walk around the recreational life in Kensington Garden, a public park in London,
you'll come across this statue of the boy who wouldn't grow up.
J.M. Barrie, the inventor of Peter Pan, commissioned the statue himself,
arranging for workmen to install it behind awning so that when the awning was taken down, Peter Pan would appear as if by magic.
Today, if people associate Kensington Gardens with fairies, it is likely because of the Peter Pan.
But Barrie himself lived in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens and took regular walk through the park with his enormous Saint Bernard.
His first Peter Pan book describes the fairies and other magical creatures who come out to play in Kensington Gardens.
After the gates and locks, even in the late to Peter Pan novel set predominantly in the Neverland,
Peter Pan tells the Darling Children that he once ran away to Kensington Gardens to live among the fairies.
Barry's fame, both during and after his lifetime, has included earlier works of Barry literature sat in Kensington Gardens.
In fact, the site's association with Barry's precedes the invention of Peter Pan by almost two centuries.
This paper situates Barry is the inheritor, not the inventor of the pre-existing mythology of the place.
By turning to the first known depiction of Kensington Fairies.
A 1721 poem by Thomas to Carl. Takata was a member of the wicked intellectual circle surrounding Joseph Addison,
a group of writers who enjoyed commercial and critical success in their own time but were afterwards relegated to the status of minor poets.
A number of recent scholars, including Abigail Williams, have called for a reassessment of literary output.
Kensington Garden is one such poem which warrants renewed critical attention.
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 or people,
and parodies that convention. By providing an origin story for a limited patch of garden to Kells,
Poem describes the romantic and political conflicts that caused the downfall of the very court which supposedly once existed on the site.
To give you a brief overview of the plot, the immortal Fairy Princess Ken falls in love with Albion, who,
while boasting impressive ancestors, including Neptune, is still mortal, born to a human mother and stolen by the fairies as an infant.
When Kenneth's father, King Oberon, discovers their relationship, he banishes Albion and marries Kenneth with Barry instead.
Albion wages war on Oberon, but dies in the ensuing conflict,
prompting Neptune to avenge his death by destroying Oberon Bronze to see the end of the poem then jumps forward the early 18th century,
when McKenna, who has already given her name to Kensington, inspires the royal gardener, Henry Wise, to construct the sunken terrace.
Wise unconsciously recreates the layout of the fallen fairy city in the design of the garden.
Why fairies and why heroic? So first, Barry.
It is unlikely that Michael was basing his poem on a pre-existing folk tale about the fight, despite the claims of his narrator.
Otherwise, for one thing, the sunken terrace had only existed for about 16 or 17 years by the time it to calibrate the poem.
And for another, it was possible to boil complex about the very folk who might circulate stories about is it that seems
reasonable to assume that tickle invented it's third tradition and I would suggest for a political
purpose to tell it was drawing on a widespread association between royalty and fairies that spanned both
oral and literary traditions that appeared in folktales about fairy kings and queens in the Inchon,
tresses of Medieval Romance and an early modern text such as Edmund Spenser's, The Faerie Queene.
Cycle adapted this fictional convention to flatter the hand of Barry Monarchy.
He was at the heart of a Whig establishment that had been broadly supportive of George the first claim to the throne,
and he had already written several poems championing the Canterbury schools by giving them the fairy treatment in Kensington Garden.
He was thus situating them in a British landscape and cultural tradition at a time when their detractors view them as foreign interlopers.
This poem about Kensington Garden seems to flatter one mysterious member of the board in particular.
It opens not in the ancient days of the fairy city, but in the 18th century,
presents with a description of the fashionable promenades that became a renowned feature of the garden during the period.
Six lines are devoted to a complimentary portrayal of one parading noblewoman introduced as England's daughter darling of the land.
So when I first set out to identify this anonymous figure, I had five main criteria based on a textual evidence of the poem.
Firstly, and most obviously, the noblewoman must have participated in the following arts.
Secondly, she must fit the description of England's metaphorical parents.
Thirdly, she must be notably tall, as she's described, towering over her companions.
Fourthly, there must be a plausible reason for this account.
Writes about time in the political context of 1721.
And finally, she should ideally have some relevance to the wider subject.
The poem, though. Here are the most likely contenders from the Royal Court.
George, the first daughter by his ex-wife, was Sophia Dorothea of Hanover.
Sophia was notably told defending the third criteria, but she spent little time in England, let alone Kensington Palace.
We can discounter quickly. The Victorian man of Letters, Leigh Hunt, instead took the poem as alluding to George,
the first daughter in North Carolina, whom he credited with initiating the promenades.
Caroline Beck will reach the first criteria and possibly also the fourth criteria,
as she had recently brought about a reconciliation between George the first and George Augustus.
On the other hand,
the reconciliation had been transparently halfhearted and to Camus perhaps unlikely to write a flattering poem about Caroline in the 1720s.
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.
We can also take George, the first other daughters, out of contention,
even though they participated in the Kensington Promenades while George the first lived openly with his mistress.
Now you've seen Wanda shooting in bed that children would not acknowledge as legitimate
for fear of overstepping the amount of controversy which the public would tolerate.
Instead, the three daughters were presented as Medici's nieces.
So it's unlikely that two wrote about any one of them in particular.
I would therefore like to put forward George the best distressed you seen as an alternative very thin anonymous noblewoman.
This reading requires a different but textually supported interpretation of England's daughter as simply the country's darling.
She undoubtedly fulfils the best criteria.
She resided in Kensington Palace and participates in the promenades while she was so renowned for her extraordinary height.
The nickname among the English population was the maypole.
Melusine also meets the fourth criteria to count as a supporter of the Hanoverian
monarchy and a compelling reason for betraying her in a flattering light.
In the early 1720s, her public image was in dire need of repair.
While some members of the English stated public as a terrorist,
the de facto queen had detractors criticised her sharply in the press, a commentary often exacerbated by a combination of age,
sexist and xenophobic prejudices not merely seen as old, unattractive and greedy as a parasite who'd come to drain the country's coffers.
Some complained that she wielded too much power as an unofficial mediator between petitioners and the king,
while others criticised her involvement in the South Sea Company, the collapse of which in 1720 caused a financial crash in Britain.
To Kelly's poem that will be read as a protest of varying aspects to flexible access aspects of the public image debate.
It provides a reputation while delicately minimising perceived power, presenting her outside in the gardens,
participating in a frivolous promenade instead of manipulating the chains behind closed doors.
She might explain the very subject of the poem.
She shares the name with one of the aristocratic deluding fairies of European folklore and the medieval prose romance Melusine.
The titular character is cast, transformed into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.
She marries on the condition that her husband will never see her on a Saturday.
But after years of marriage, he breaks his promise and his through the keyhole.
While she bends the betrayed Melusine transforms into a dragon and flies away.
This supernatural figure might seem like a strange namesake for members of the early modern nobility.
However, Melusine is never just a monster. And the romance text.
She is devoted, capable and inserted into real world genealogies.
Is the founding matriarch of the house of Luce in a house that rules various principalities in Europe.
And that happened during the late medieval period.
George, the first mistress, was probably named Medici because the Monaco is associated with dynastic power as well as magic.
In the poem, Teddy's undying devotion to Albion can be read as a sympathetic commentary on its relationship,
both to George the First and to the nation at large. Albion is, of course, also an ancient name for Britain.
There's a discrepancy between the back story and the reality of the garden early on in Kensington Garden account gives misleading
impression that its berries authentically derived from the British royal tradition by ascribing them the expected characteristics.
They dance from sunlight, still human children and for more domestic cleanliness, the silver coins.
As the plot unfolds, however, his fairies are not engaged in the more traditional activities of folklore.
When fairies variously reward, trick or punish human beings, sometimes helping them in domestic tasks,
sometimes leading them into Barre Hills to participate in the kind of sweeping conflict found in classical epic to count.
It draws attention to the incongruity between their size and behaviour by arming them with humorously small weapons that burn spears,
for instance, resemble rows of needles.
Finally, instead of seamlessly combining English diaries and classical deities in the same work to find humour in their jarring interactions.
Despite what the name suggests, 18th century Wilderness Gardens were not designed to look like wild natural spaces,
but to demonstrate the designer's ability to contain nature within hedges and zones.
Creating sheltered walkways where visitors could lose themselves in intellectual and personal contemplation.
Kensington Garden is a little remembered work of literature today.
Nevertheless, it proved surprisingly influential over the 18th and 19th centuries,
reprinted in multiple volumes over the period, as well as in collections of 2000 work.
A number of Victorian local historians keen to ascribe a mystical back story to Kensington, repeated the claim that its name,
derived from a fairy princess Kenna,
encouraged their readers to sit in Kensington Gardens and enchant their surroundings by reimagining Celts fairies.
Oh, where? Brown, for instance, wrote. We would ask our readers to step in, take a comfortable seat, say in the final book,
and closing their eyes allow themselves to drift backwards, backwards to that remote period when fairies gambles on the silence.
A golden age when all men were brave and honest and all women fair and true.
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,
and clustering around the dwelling place of their monarch were crowded streets and glittering spires of the capital of the fairy empire.
As late as 1903, a new comic opera based on a poem opened at the Savoy Theatre,
demonstrating that it continued to have a cultural afterlife since the period when J.M. Barrie was writing his works.
Frustratingly, we don't know for certain whether Barry had to come in.
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,
19th and 20th century riffs onto Cal's work shortly after the publication of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,
a contributor to Notes and Queries Group two, Cal and Barry, together as the Mythologised Barry Kensington.
This story has broader implications for the ways in which we understand the relationship between real and imagined histories of place,
the physical characteristics of the sunken terrace in a form to Cal's invented mythology
and the ensuing fairy tradition changed the built environment of the public park.
Visitors today can see the Peter Pan statue play in the Peter Pan themed playground on the cut out an oak installation,
a calf tree stump decorated with fairies and woodland creatures.
These complicated interactions between tangible and intangible heritage encourage us to look beyond disciplinary boundaries,
not just between periods of time, but between literature, folklore, art, history and geography.
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much.
I think a whole new world said to me and I think I probably speak for everyone now.
We're going to hear from Todd Bullock. Todd Bullock is senior lecturer in Renaissance drama at the University of Huddersfield.
His research interests include Shakespeare and the pre-history of environmentalism,
magic and Science, Repertory and Performance Studies and Global Shakespeare.
He is the author of Eco Criticism and Early Modern English Literature, Green Pastures and Literature and Nature in the Renaissance,
an eco critical anthology as well as over a dozen articles in journals.
Right. Thank you, Diane. So my paper today is on the Witch of Edmonton, one of the great Jacobean witchcraft plays.
I'm going to focus on it as a play about wetlands. Wetlands have long been a bastion of magical beliefs.
Anyone who caught Alexandra and Diane's paper yesterday will not need much convincing that a whiff of the supernatural clippings about these places,
as surely as the pungent stench of stagnant water.
But back in the Anglo-Saxon era, the author of Beowulf tars Grendel's mother as a mere with or torn hag.
While the Knight Century hagiography of St Pathak recounts his battles with misshapen bin dwelling demons.
Tales of here at the Wake,
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.
And in the Jacobean period, the Weird Sisters [INAUDIBLE] broth includes the fillets of a funny snake.
And of course, Caliban conjures infections from the fans to blast Prospero.
In a 6019 protest ballad entitled The Police Complaint,
the author calls upon all this Neptune in the moon to curse the developers that seek to drain and enclose the wetlands.
Meanwhile, on the continent, the pontine marshes in Italy at the foot of Mount Cicero have long been linked with the sorceress,
thirsty for back to antiquity. It's easy to fathom why magical beliefs would prove particularly pernicious in these sparsely populated backwaters.
Not only were schools and churches few and far between,
but rituals involving sympathetic magic would satisfy a deep yearning to exert some control over an unstable environment prone to flooding.
Moreover, diseases afflicting humans and cattle are commonplace and the absence of germ theory.
Finland communities desperate to find a scapegoat would be easily tempted to attribute an otherwise inexplicable outbreak to witchcraft.
Now medical minded historians have proffered dozens of ingenious explanations for witchcraft and attempts that often
portray the incapacity of the scientific mind to comprehend why the widespread faith in magic in pre-modern societies.
Confessions of witchcraft, if not extracted under torture, must have been.
It's often assumed, prompted by some psychotic episode brought on by ergot fungus poisoning,
syphilis, Huntington's disease, Lyme disease, dementia, etc.
Now, it's not the intent of this paper today to propose a reductive,
magic bullet explanation to debunk a phenomenon that's linked with a vast complex of socio cultural forces,
spiritual traditions and environmental factors. But if we turn from mythical and universal explanations of witchcraft to ask why it thrived
in particular locales and the prevalence of magic in wetlands doesn't hurt further inquiry.
Modern appreciation of wetlands has developed in the absence of a serious, often fatal disease that they want spawned.
While malaria disappeared from the UK around the end of the First World War and it's now classed as an imported disease.
It was once endemic in low lying areas along fens, marshes and estuaries.
The reason we still seldom think of it in early modern England is that the mosquito a Spanish
loan word first recorded in 1572 and only gradually adopted masqueraded as the fly or nets.
While the world owed malaria borrowed from the Italian in 1740 was disguised under the term ague.
The Ague could refer to any fever in general.
But descriptions of Persian or cotton fevers, which flare up every third or fourth day, occur frequently in early modern texts.
And they correspond exactly with the symptoms of Plasmodium vivax, a fever every other day, and Plasmodium malaria, a fever every 72 hours.
William Harvey, the esteemed physician, suffered from malaria, as did Samuel peeps.
And Oliver Cromwell contracted these Persian fevers. Daniel Defoe left a very colourful account of its virulence in the Essex marshes.
Precise epidemiological data is, of course, hard to come by for the early modern era,
but parish records indicate considerably higher rates of mortality near Marsh's the favoured breeding
grounds of the NFL's ultra part of us that no native mosquito capable of transmitting malaria.
As its etymology suggests, early moderns blamed malaria on bad air.
But as far back as 1666, the physician,
Thomas Sydenham wrote a detailed study on Persian fevers and drew a correlation between outbreaks and spikes in insect populations.
When insects form extraordinarily, then argues and contains up here early about midsummer and the autumn proves very sickly.
Most people prior to 1666, however, assumed that darker forces were at work.
It's probably not coincidental that areas with extensive wetlands, such as the Fens, Essex, Kent,
Somerset and the Ribble Valley in Lancashire witnessed disproportionately large numbers of witchcraft trials.
Is it possible?
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,
that the swellings caused by mosquito bites might in some cases have been mistaken for the
infamous witch's teat in which they allegedly suckled their impious familiars with blood.
The connection between wetlands, malaria and witchcraft offers a fresh angle on which to view the wish of Edmondson.
A good deal of commentary on this could be in place to determine whether it debunks witchcraft and decries Sawyer's
execution or gleefully exploits her grisly fate for its entertainment value and colludes with misogyny and ageism.
Another strand of scholarship focuses on the gender politics of the domestic tragedy,
often attempting to clarify the linkages between the three plotlines focussed on respectively the bigamist Frank Thorney,
the Witch Mother Sawyer and the clown Cody Banks.
Little attention has been paid to the place. Environmental context.
17th century Edmonton stood alongside substantial wetlands over a half mile wide on the Western Bank of the River Lee.
A number of wetlands still in Girdle Edmonton to this day. Ramsey Marsh and Waltham O.
Marsh spread out along its northern edges and Tottenham and Hackney Marshes lie to its south.
The only reason we have forgotten about Edmondson Marsh is that much of it was
obliterated by the construction of a series of reservoirs in the early 20th century.
Jacobean Edmundson, however, 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.
Mother Sawyer resided near at Winch Moor Hill on the western fringe of Edmonton,
putting her in the vicinity of two such tributaries which I've shown here with the blue arrows.
The Simons Brook to the north and more brook to itself through the tendency of water to stagnate and the slow flowing watercourses.
The severely polluted Moor Brook was converted and buried in the 1950s, but in the early 17th century.
It was essentially an open sewer and an ideal habitat for malaria breeding mosquitoes.
Seen in the light of environmental history,
it seems revealing that the Witch of Edmonds and Associates Mother Sawyer with dirty foul water in her first appearance in the play.
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
a common stink for all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues to fall and run into.
The striking comparison of Sawyer to a sink could refer to a pool or pit formed in the ground for collecting wastewater or sewage.
The metaphor may have been suggested by the near homophones of Sawyer and Sewer,
but she complicates this by tracing the source of filth back to the community, back to her slanderous accusers.
If the common sink is unsanitary, it's because the people have befouled it.
By the same token, if she is a witch, the townsfolk have driven her to it by their constant recrimination.
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.
It could be a marsh, a pool, a wetlands. A meaning that dates back to 1594, according to the OED.
Whichever reading we prefer.
The speech frames the presence of the witch in the community as analogous to an unhealthy cesspool or marsh afflicting the people with disease.
They claim that she or speaks her cattle or speaks their cattle at which their corn themselves, their servants and their babies.
That nurse. I'm sorry. I got tired of. An insightful reading of the play.
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.
But what will sunglasses think as a reference to the sinful womb?
Another considers what sicknesses might have been endemic in Edmonton in 1620.
Don Fisher similarly reflects upon the play a sense of a correspondence between
dirty water and women's bodies supposedly tainted by inspiration in childbirth.
Revisiting this witchcraft play with an invite with an eye on environmental history
is a place one could add that identifies another literal source of contagion
in stagnant and polluted wetlands and watercourses that actually stood alongside
Edmundson in the 17th century and would have been an incubator for malaria.
Now the parish records of All Saints Edmondson, now in the London Metropolitan Archive,
do not record causes of death, but archival evidence confirms that AGU was present there in the early 17th century.
Don Clark, in his Trumpet of Apollo, touts his ague remedies and directs readers to persons who can vouch for their efficacy.
Observing that Mistress Lead dwelling with Mistress Brett and her mother at Edmonton, having had a double quarantine a long time, was cured.
In areas where marsh fever was rife, many would have turned to quack solvers or folk remedies peddled by wise women or cunning men.
But those who had lost loved ones or precious cattle might blame vulnerable, disreputable people on the social margins for having coerced them.
Is therefore ironic as well as tragic that Elizabeth Sawyer herself would have known this grief, this loss all too well.
I discovered, to my shock in the archives last week of her 11 children, six of them died in infancy.
The daughter named after her died upon Christmas 1597 at the age of one.
The father in May, a boy, Ambrose, did not live through his first day in 1602.
This is the year again that reports an AGU in Edmonton.
Sawyer suffers a unspeakable series of losses to her two year old son, William, and two day old daughter Joanna.
Both die on the same day, April 9th. Six weeks later, Joanna's twin sister, Mary, died.
Now. I was almost crying in the archives. A number of factors such as malnourishment, that could have contributed to these premature deaths.
But three and two months in the same household smacks of a transmissible disease,
and the presence of marshes and polluted water around Edmonton points to a disease that's water borne or carried by water insects.
Many adults recover from malaria, but the young do not fare so well.
Malaria is known to trigger a devastating uptick in infant and child mortality, and infections during pregnancy often result in stillbirth.
The inhabitants of Jacobean London were well aware of the health risks posed by clogged urban waterways,
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.
Dekker observes that standing water does nothing but gather corruption.
News from Gravesend, co-written with Thomas Middleton, blames plague on bad air, sucked from standing pools from bogs from rank and Derbyshire.
Fans solve this problem and supply a rapidly expanding London with clean water.
The authorities had launched an ambitious hydro engineering project in the first decade of King James reign.
The New River, which piped fresh water for amble springs near where to the conduit 13 well, north London.
And this was delved through the western edge of Edmonton.
The project was spearheaded by Money Baron Hugh Middleton, supported by King James,
but encountered fierce opposition from local landowners who feared that diverting channels
through their farmland would create quagmires that might drown cattle and of course,
spread disease. Despite these qualms, the New River was completed in 16, 13 and six years later,
the New River Company was incorporated by a royal charter, which makes it a criminal offence to dump rubbish into the river.
Passage of this act suggests that pollution was a recognised problem in the New River in 1619, shortly before Sawyer was convicted.
It invites us to interpret our persecution as the ritual cleansing of a befouled waterway,
or think it's therefore striking that the New River was cut right through when Maryhill,
the western flank of Edmonton, where Sawyer resided, introducing more water into an already modern flood prone area.
When the Witch of Edmonton was first staged,
the community at the apex would have been anxious about outsiders interfering with the white ones in their midst.
While Londoners were increasingly conscious of their reliance upon the northern suburbs
for clean water and would have been concerned by reports of outbreaks of witchcraft,
of disease or witchcraft conjured diseases in places upstream such as Edmonton.
Interestingly, Mother's story was not the only person compared to putrid water in the play before.
It's another transcript. Analogy between bodies and what one's in the bigamy plot.
When Frank Thorney exclaims, presumably while pounding on his chest.
Or Here, here is the fin, when which this hydra of discontent grows rank occurring in the very next scene,
after Sawyer's comparison of herself to a polluted think, the motive for filthy water serves to bind together the plotlines.
The domestic tragedy plot in which Frank Thorne is compelled to marry Susan to secure a dowry.
Despite having already wed, Winifred exposes the pervasive greed of the middle classes depicted in the play.
More precisely, it's the cash strapped Gentry's greed for land of the acres owned by the yeoman
farmer Carter that pressures Thorney to obey his father and marry Carter's daughter.
The same hunger for land and their 17th century is driving the reclamation projects to drain and destroy the wetlands.
The allusion here to learning Hydra may be classical,
but these ominous references to wetlands as monstrous spaces conspire with these efforts to drain and enclose the wetlands.
It is therefore somewhat curious that Sawyer's most bitter enemy in the play is a man named Banks.
No person of that name appears in the play.
Source The wonderful discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer by assigning her nemesis the name banks with its connotations of embankments.
The playwrights frame this conflict between them not only in terms of rich versus poor
and men versus women also is an elemental struggle between drylands and weapons.
Giving the aspects of a fitful environmental allegory in so your first scene, Banks confronts her and accuses her of trespassing.
What makes, though upon my Ground explained, she's gathering a few rotten sticks to warm me.
An exchange that captures the stark realities of early modern fuel poverty.
But the uncharitable banks drives away the old woman who has just been compared
to dirty water with verbal and physical violence hanging out of my ground.
The word ground appears a third time when Sawyer declares banks is the ground of all my scandal.
And in the ensuing scene during his outburst about the thing within him is prompted by
Susan's request to know the ground of his disturbance or the deliberately or subconsciously.
The play draws a recurrent contrast between dry ground versus watery commons,
associating the latter with a dolt stricken bigamist and a curse in which.
The belief that marshes might be controlled through magical incantations, his voice in another place set in Edmundson,
untitled The Merry Devil of Edmonton, which was a titular Magus, Peter Fable, who boasts he could conjure a flood along the river.
Lea Well, first hand in field in such rings of mist, has never rose from any Derbyshire stand.
I'll make the buried feet arise wherein drowned the marshes under the bridge.
Feature ambitions.
Brackish water surging southward from where in Hertfordshire, towards north London to the marshes here would include those in and around Edmondson.
Amidst the floods or blame for disease outbreaks, papal speech has decidedly sinister overtones.
This, beyond the loss of a few twigs, is the situation that the paranoid banks is trying to prevent.
When he expels Sawyer from his ground behaving like actual banks constructed to hold back the creeks and marshes.
Although Sawyer never conjures a flood, she does manage to temporarily drown.
Banks the son, Cody Banks, in a comic scene memorably depicted on the title page of the 1621 play text.
When Cutie asks the witch to help him seduce Kate Carter, she tells him to follow her dog.
Are familiar who will lead him to the girl?
Instead, the dog Cody identifies as a water spaniel, leads him into an unnamed body of water up to his neck.
Katie cries offstage, Help, I'm drowned. I'm drowned here on the title page.
And immediately after the stage direction.
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,
which we might spy a benign recreation of sacrificial drownings and ancient rainmaking rituals.
After all, Katie is adorned in the costume of a morris dancer in the scene,
which some historians and early modern Puritans trace back to pre-Christian fertility rites.
The scene also stages a reversal of the ducking of the which which Cuddy seems to allude to when he complains.
Let's have no more of these ducking devices. But he survived this ordeal.
But the scene does play on fears of thinking and flooding in marshland communities.
Audiences in 1621 familiar with the topography of Greater London would have likely
inferred that Curry has been plunged into the marshes and the edge of Edmondson.
Black magic cannot bring Marsh to the town. It brings the townsfolk to and into the marsh.
Which if Edmonton also furnishes evidence that early modern believed witches were vectors for malaria like illnesses.
In a scene that anticipates Wordsworth, Guinea,
Blake and Harry deal for your curses or plagues not with an eternal chill, but with physical pain by bones.
They include joints, cramp, convulsions, stretch and crack.
They sinews along with fever and chills. Muscle and joint pain are among the most common conspicuous symptoms of malaria.
Bone loss and periodontitis are also characteristic of chronic malaria, which forensic archaeologists can detect through skeletal deterioration.
This supports the conjecture that Sawyer may have suffered from malaria herself since good kill reports in the pamphlet.
She was crooked and deformed, even bending together as illustrated by the portrait of her on the title page of both the
pamphlet in the play and the playwrights compare it to a a bow buckled and bent together.
Malaria patients also frequently develop anaemia.
And good call. Describe Sergio's complexion as pale and ghostlike, without any blood at all.
Oh yes. Unsightly appearance would have led the people of 17th century Edmonton to conclude she was afflicted with a disfiguring disease,
while the dread that it was transmissible was seemingly borne out by the fact so many of her own children had died.
No wonder she was shunned and hated like a sickness.
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.
Banks accusations of an abuse drives voyeurs into indulging in revenge fantasies.
Diseases, plagues, the curses of an old woman follow and fall upon you.
50 lines later, she repeats. The similar curse rots and formalities it up and time.
Retaliating with these curses for your echoes, the invectives of the deformed Caliban.
All the infections of the sun sucks up from fogs bends flat sun prosper fall.
In his first appearance in the play, Caliban has implied that his mother gathered wicked due from an unwholesome fen.
The practice malavika and the people of Edmonton seem to suspect mother saw Europe doing the same,
but rather than sprinkle wicked do from a raven feather, one who dispatches her dog, who bewitched the townsfolk by touching them.
Play here, I think, taps into fears of zoonotic transmission of diseases like malaria in early modern England.
The archival research that undergirds this paper suggests another story.
It may have been both a factor and a victim of malaria.
And knowing that she not only suffered physical pain, but the psychological trauma of losing six children.
Further, what the Jacobean playwrights work with, but shy away from her elevation to tragic stature.
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.
Research and ethnographic research in Africa has shown that it's very common for malaria to be blamed on black magic.
Researchers in Gambia found a malaria was attributed to blue are witches who are believed to conjure a foul wind,
the sick, the life force of the bewitched. But magic and science aren't mutually exclusive in places like West or South Africa.
A survey of the advocacy in Kenya revealed that while 80% accept that mosquitoes can be a vector, 34% still attribute malaria to witchcraft.
And the Bermuda and Cameroon subscribed to the notion that witches can infect people with disease,
but also tell an ideological myth that malaria arrived in their community when a thief
switched a bag supposed to contain the ancestors blessings with a bag full of mosquitoes.
Many medical studies lament the supposed persistence of such beliefs and assume if people were better educated,
they would seek proper Western treatments rather than consult witchcraft.
Which doctors? Well, well, meaning.
Such studies can be, of course, patronising faith in quack remedies and anti-scientific sentiments persist in the ostensibly enlightened West,
as COVID 19 is made painfully clear.
And historians of magic, I think, would do well to keep that in mind when drawing on ethnographic studies of witchcraft from outside Europe.
Comparisons between contemporary rural Africa and early modern England can unwittingly imply that the former remains mired in a primitive,
pre-modern past. But it's easy to trouble such assumptions with a thought experiment or a show of hands.
How many of you among us today have seen a microscopic app, a complex and protozoan parasite?
Imagine trying to explain Plasmodium vivax to inhabitants of Edmonton in 1621.
Why not, say, demon anthropologist to treat these folks properly, seriously?
And the same goes for historians of magic.
Proposing a link between malaria amplification and early modern England, this paper is not so much a plea for disenchantment as a provocation.
To think more about our understanding of witchcraft can be enriched by eco medical eco feminist approaches.
Thank you.
Amy Blakemore is a novelist whose first novel, The Manningtree Witches, actually managed to appeal to me as an accurate representation of witchcraft.
It would be great to hear from Amy if she's ready to comment.
I am AK Blakemore for Amy, my debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, which came out a couple of years ago now.
I can never quite remember when precisely because of the kind of dilatory COVID time that we went through,
but is about the early career of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder general in Manningtree.
Manningtree is a place I know very well, a small town in Essex.
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.
I'm sure a lot of you would have passed through it on your way to vastly more metropolitan Norwich.
And yes, a place I know well because my dad was there. So I'm down there kind of a few times a year.
And real and imagined histories as a phrase, is something that's very interesting to me,
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
way the history and in fact the myth of the which find a general has been transformed and revised by Manningtree and its inhabitants.
The last time I was down in Manningtree, I was giving a talk to a local book group at the Thorne of Mossley,
which of course historically, although it's disputed was the in the which find a general himself orange and brown.
It's still there and it's now fairly boujee gastropub with some rooms above.
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.
And I was talking to the barman and he was discussing the book.
They sell little postcards of the frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins book, and he said,
I love taking people when they're staying at the pub to the room upstairs where he died.
And I was kind of, oh, there's a room that he supposedly died in. Which one?
And he says, well, whichever one they're staying in,
obviously every Halloween in the high streets at Manningtree, there is a witch finding competition.
And what this involves is Barbie dolls wearing little fellows,
which hats that are left around the centre of town and the local children are exhorted to find them.
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.
From Matthew Hawkins, the witch find a general rather than to subject them to carceral violence as a sort of
equivocal ity about the way that Manningtree interacts with its history in this regard.
Manningtree is now pretty much a commuter town.
It's very sparse, quiet and has a vaguely.
It's a very nebulous term, but most energy, I would say, as so many small towns in England do.
Matthew Watkins was, I think, most memorably portrayed by Vincent Price and the Witchfinder film,
which is I'm kind of a massive fan of sixties, seventies schlock, folk horror.
So obviously I love the Witchfinder film. The tagline for which was England has never looked so beautiful or been so evil.
And a great part of it was filmed in a village near Manningtree Laburnum,
which retains a lot more of its original 16th century and Tudor architecture.
And it put me in mind of the fact that Manningtree is slap bang in the middle of
constable country in which an area of Essex known for its particularly beautiful light.
Manningtree itself is just a few miles down the road from Fulford Mill, which is where Constable painted the famous hay wing.
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,
but is the interface between beauty and horror.
And I think it's something that is really typified by a place like Manningtree,
which has such a dark history, but also such associations with the pastoral of peace and beauty as well.
This idea of wetlands is something that is very striking to me.
So Manningtree is right near to the castle marshes in Essex, but it is also bang slap on the middle of the star estuary.
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.
So water runs in, a mortar runs out on a daily basis, but the extent to which it completely changes the landscape.
So when the tide is in, it's an incredibly deep estuary.
There are boats on it. You can fish there. And when the water runs out, it leaves flats.
It almost looks as though you could walk across it from manningtree to the other side and the landscape is completely transfigured.
And I suppose I was very interested into what that would have felt like and that changing
landscape to the people who lived there in the mid 17th century and notably the estuary,
was also during the English Civil War and before known as smuggling routes,
something that kind of interested me about Essex at this time or busy,
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.
Not because the war really came to us until later, but because of the fear of Catholic invasion from the continent.
And the smuggling was a very typical time that went on through Essex with the Star Estuary running from the coast down towards London.
But also Catolica was smuggled across that waterway.
The community on a macro level of Manningtree has dealt with and faced its own history in terms of
both the Witchfinder almost becoming a cottage industry within the town which walks local museums,
things like that, trees that have basically become sites of pilgrimage because witches were believed to have hidden there.
But also the way we think about our history on a more national basis.
I was educated at state school in London and in the early 2000,
which was where I went to secondary school and in writing the book I was very
much reminded of the paucity of my own knowledge around the English Civil War.
And this is as someone who specialised in the early modern period university.
And I came to the conclusion that the reason we don't really learn about the English Civil War, I certainly did.
And anecdotally, having spoken about this with friends of my generation, they didn't either.
The English Civil War was just not something that we ever dealt with,
is because it felt like the English Civil War couldn't really be integrated into a sort of nationalistic
narrative almost that I felt my certainly my secondary level of history education promoted.
There aren't really heroes on either side,
and that was something that was a larger version of the confronting of history that I was looking at in Manningtree itself.
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you, Diane.
Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for a really thoughtful and careful explication of your any engagement with pace.
We also have with us the outstanding, amazing, wise woman of fantasy studies.
Ellen Kushner. If you haven't read Ellen's Magnificent Thomas the primer rush straight to Amazon now.
So now we're going to hear from Ellen. Welcome and looking forward to your talk.
Thank you very much.
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.
I cannot claim that Thomas was the first thing that grabbed me.
It was still my best friend as a young teen, and she was obsessed with it.
And she was a woman of mystery and creativity. And we talked a lot about Thomas.
The Rhymer tried to find the original tune Mutually Despised, the Stylise banned version.
But eventually it came to be part of my own inner landscape.
When I came to write the novel, it was entirely because Terry Wendling,
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,
where she was the fantasy editor. And someone else asked her would she do the same thing based on Ballard's?
Terry was living in my back room at the time. And I said, If you have anyone else, Thomas, I'll kill you.
Because I've always wanted to be the one to read about Thomas.
And she said, Oh, dear, I did give it to somebody else, but let me see if I can get it back.
And she did. When I was in university, I was in a play writing class, and I had to write a one act play.
And what I ended up writing was a one act play called The Homecoming of True Thomas the Rhymer,
in which you find out what happens after the rhymer returns from Ellis Island with the gift of the tongue that cannot lie.
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.
I created all of those for that little one act play. Suddenly I had to write a novel.
And my previous novel, my first novel, Swords Point, had taken me seven years to write.
And I did this one in about seven weeks because I had a deadline.
But I was also assisted by the fact that everything in it comes from British folklore and specifically the folklore of the borders.
And when you're a teenager and you're obsessed, this is what you learn.
You know, you just kind of follow your passions. And so I had a lot of it to hand.
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.
And I would like to say that the whole novel was written in the landscape of dream.
I mean, Thomas the Rhymer was apparently a historical figure.
And there are documents and things that, you know, in 1138, he only gives land to his son or something like that.
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.
It's set in the land of the olden days, when minstrels walked the hills and occasionally run into the Queen of Elf Land.
So I did a draft of the novel, but I knew that I needed to know what the hills looked like.
And this was in 1985. There was no Internet.
And I was a poor student, not a student, but I was living the life of a poor student.
And I was in Boston. I had moved to Boston at that time.
And I went to a famous bookshop downtown called the Globe Bookshop.
And this was before the Internet, you know, so people are still bought travel books and still bought coffee table books of beautiful places.
And I found the very expensive coffee table book of photos of the Scots borders.
And I was too cheap, I think, or too poor to poor and too cheap, mostly too cheap to buy it.
So I basically sat in a corner very quietly of the Distinguished Globe Bookshop in downtown Boston,
leafing through this book of photographs and taking notes.
That fall, the World Fantasy Convention was held in London, and a friend of mine, the writer Jane Yolen,
said, We'll come up to Edinburgh because that's where she and her husband were staying at the time.
She's from Massachusetts. And stay with us and we'll go out and look at the borders and you can see the Golden
Hills and get a sense of what it really looks like so that you can get it into your book.
So I took the train up to Edinburgh and I remember I had sort of fallen asleep and as we
started getting into the borders I woke up and looked out and I saw the beauty of it.
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.
Jane and I went out for a drive the next day.
She was very brave because she was driving stick shift on the wrong side of the road, which usually her husband did.
But he was I think he had a fever. So she took me out. It was very kind of her.
And we ended up driving out to Earlston just because it was a place on the map that was aerosol doon.
And we went out there and found the Thomas the Rymer Cafe in Earlston.
We thought, Wow, what a bit of luck. Went in to have a cup of tea.
And I said that I was delighted to be there because of Thomas the rhymer.
And they said, Oh, this tower is right out back.
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.
So there it was, out back the ruins of Thomas the Reimers Tower.
Whether he actually ever lived in it or not, who knows? It was probably a 16th century keeper or something like that.
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,
which was there and walked and walked and just caught the feel of what it's like to walk those hills.
Very beautiful, by the way. We spent a few days up around Hawick as it is pronounced creek.
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.
I was distressed because I said, this isn't quite right.
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.
I remember from the northern hills and the hills of the border.
So on our way back up to Glasgow, we went to Earlston and drove around the Eldon Hills and there it was again.
And do you think the difference was the trees?
That there were no trees around really on the hillside except these kind of depressing plantations of pines,
whereas there's a lot of various sorts of greenery set against the barrenness and bleakness and ruggedness of the hills.
Thank you. Thank you very much for that.
First to be introduced is Leah Tilly, an archaeologist,
specifically an Oxford botanist and training palaeontologist palaeontologist whose
focus is on pre-history and environmental reconstruction by a plant focussed proxies.
Let's get started with Leah's presentation. Thank you all very much.
Chipping Norton is an Iron Age cohort in lowland Scotland and it is rather special, has had extensive excavations.
I've really wanted to explain where I'm coming from in terms of my own understanding of these systems.
Now this is a tangent, so again, bear with me,
but when it comes to defining in naturalists minds and conjure your typical Victorian curiosity collector,
perhaps on a similar ethical level to an antiquarian and which aren't simply derided.
I have a definition without socio cultural over time defines the naturalist simply as
someone who knows rather a lot about the natural world and the natural objects within it.
I suggest then all individuals across time were or are to some extent naturalists.
This is a generalist. I recognise those are dangerous.
But based on the basic definition, I think it is even possible to suggest that prehistoric communities were the pioneers of natural history.
This has been the mental equivalent of an earworm for me throughout my own research,
and it was perhaps begun by this very text to which I managed to excavate from a very dusty bookshop,
which paradoxically I've not been able to find since. So this is against what I believe, actually, in a sense,
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?
The nature? Now, if we add to the definition of a naturalistic type of close study of natural objects
and experimentation in order to define the qualities of these same objects,
then prehistoric communities, perhaps more than any others,
are becoming via these mechanisms more knowledgeable beyond the utilitarian considerations of known subsistence,
their definition was certainly different, perhaps more animistic,
but that does not necessarily imply the ability to overwhelm or terrify only a deeper level of respect with nature and the landscape itself.
And it is also clear that with knowledge or understanding does not come a cessation of fear.
I feel capacity to bear is unfortunately endless.
But specifically these first applying to ancient communities.
Well, how can that be when communities of naturalists, which is who I believe these people are constantly freed themselves via knowledge.
This is not invalidated by some of this knowledge associating with categories of the sacred or indeed the ritual aspects of magic.
Because as we all know, these have as much value as any other consideration.
The landscape itself is formed of differential erosion, and what you really need to take away from this aspect,
at least, is that this is a premium agricultural landscape.
It has been for thousands of years,
and this has fed into how individuals interacted with this landscape from the very beginning, including in the Neolithic.
The sites were more ritual in nature, quite understandably, because these are hunter gatherer communities.
And then agricultural intensification came at same time as large scale,
rather brutal landscape clearance in some instances in the Iron Age with agricultural intensification.
This is a highly ritualised landscape during the Neolithic and Bronze Age,
also arguably the Iron Age, where conscious construction decisions were influenced by the landscape,
geomorphology and a predetermined profile, and what environmental conditions were required for the foundation of a ritual site.
I should note that I am not 100% equating ritual with magic or the other way around, but they are all very interlinked.
And because this is pre-history, we don't have any necessarily written documentation.
So I'm having to give you a bit of a and nebulous concept of the entire thing.
One of the predetermined factors associated with situation of these sites is that they aren't higher elevations or slaves.
As a hill site, tripping is a bit different and in an expansive sea of archaeological contention.
Cunliffe stated in 2006 that there may be no such thing as an atypical hill fort.
And from that site in the West SEAL sorts project, he still tried to define what the criterion for defining a hill fort were,
and one of those was that it would be situated in a dominant position.
Not a dominant position does not necessarily mean high elevation.
It just means that it is an important area in the landscape.
Could even be the conjunction of two rivers.
On the whole, all of the sites on the east Lothian coastal plain and there are more than 20 are situated in dominant positions.
The ritual sites, however, are almost always situated on points of high elevation.
And this is something which makes them distinct campaign.
No, not previously thought of as much of a ritual site.
So that's a little bit intriguing. What exists is a network of sites connected through direct line of sight in many instances
to the centralised point or to pain or eye contact is the foundation of human connection.
The building blocks from which we construct the metaphysical boundary is how we perceive other human beings.
Through this. We also form our intentions in terms of our relationship to objects, people,
places that this concept is intentionally incorporated into a network of ritual sites suggests that prehistoric
communities actively manipulated time and place factors to form connections between natural objects within the landscape.
And that is pretty cool. So in the beginning there existed the environment.
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.
Then collectives as individuals made a decision and a concerted effort was made not to reform this landscape,
but create monuments within it, which melded seamlessly into the fabric of the landscape.
These Neolithic and Bronze Age ritual sites further from the mundane use of local natural materials,
constructed spaces which lived within the environment,
interacted actively with it, were not disparate, despite the overt connotations of clearance, which suggests some level of destruction.
Indeed, areas were cleared. Artificial constructions were situated where previously natural objects dominated,
but these were perhaps deliberately not so distinct from each other.
So the prime example I have of this in the eastern coastal plain is Pancake Hill,
at which during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age there was an organised program of ritual clearance.
This was done through small in-situ burning events, numerous tiny fires across the landscape of this site.
And after these fires were burned out. And these fires were mainly oak and alder based.
After these fires burn, the hearth would be ripped out and the spread of the ashes would go right across the site.
And this would happen over and over again so that it goes beyond just clearance.
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?
This ash would have coloured that site. It would have been noticeable and quite impressive.
Now this clearance is clearly different from clearances at other sites of a more occupation based site like Standing Stone,
which isn't that far away, in which clearances were undertaken under similar right in a similar style.
So they were small burning events, but these were more associated with cleanliness.
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.
So there are obvious motivations for landscape clearance and some of them that are mundane, like at Standing Stone.
Yet there was also a clear dialogue between embodiments of environments.
These could arguably even be the natural objects in this case the plants themselves and the immediate subsistence and survival of communities.
Whilst Woodland was a marginalised environment, an iron age, perhaps a more sacred space due to earlier association with ritual sites.
There's evidence that these stands were given space to breathe.
The arboreal species profiles, after all, are more indicative of a secondary woodland,
which is a type of environmental space which is typified by regeneration.
This is the extent that evidence indicates that woodlands encroached on agricultural systems that were hard fought in the beginning.
And instead of getting rid of this encroachment,
what communities did is they built a buffer zone around agricultural systems of virtual waste ground plant communities,
and that existed as a boundary between these two environments.
Woodland was rare in this landscape at this point. The resources were precious and the space.
This was a significant aspect of a sacred memory state.
Natural objects, specifically plants were maintained not just in terms of wider plant communities,
but they also had individual specialist significance.
And that was assigned particularly at Precision Road East and west to Henbury now has been is a really cool
plant and it's incredibly uncommon in Scotland even today in pre-history it was probably even more uncommon.
So there is a potential that they actively encouraged the growth of this plant and as a plant it has optical properties,
including it being narcotic analgesic and sedative.
Now so great work was done by Giant, which records the effects of pain on communities when ingested.
And he recorded that it caused altered visions of haziness and colour alteration and altered the perception and emotional state of subjects.
So it created giddiness and increased motor skills.
Now, this is important because in this regard been was valued in terms of the sacred space it could create within a human consciousness,
an altered vision and reality. So plants as natural objects, defined ritual aspects, not only physically, but also as a metaphysical tool,
a way to bridge boundaries and create visionary space apart from natural reality in essence,
and then has the potential to exist in both the physical and physical spaces simultaneously.
It's a very special planet, so it's anything could be considered magic, in my opinion.
Surely it is this that dimensional travel has always been possible.
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
appear to have a chameleon like quality in terms of reflecting the natural characteristics of woodland,
maintaining the connection visibly to the landscape.
This is true to the extent of mirror. Natural growth qualities of materials within a construction process.
So the brilliant example in this case is fit east.
And it is not that far from Japan at all. And this site is late in the Olympic to late Bronze Age.
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.
Now, this fence is structured in a rather normal way, up to a point.
So that staves of oak or of hazel and in between those staves has been woven willer.
And what's really special in this case is that integrated into a number of base construction is integrated into the hurdle itself.
A number of examples of the spiny, really spiny branches of prunus species like blackthorn.
And this has a really visual and tactile effect. Can only theorise as to why they've done this.
But it is important. The intention of the site.
Could it not be overlooked in natural construction?
So message in the choice of materials. The spiny branches of prunus species do not welcome someone to interact with a space
they threaten and are defensive on screens which conceal an inlet into the earth,
a pit. The printed species branches say, do not encroach on this space.
You are not welcome in the visceral visual message or perhaps the prunus species branches.
All camouflage. Blurring artificial lines of the structure.
Mimicking the natural grace of a thicket. This could even potentially be a way of honouring the natural object of diminishing
destruction on the natural landscape caused by the construction itself.
The renationalisation of a space that is still sacred.
The inclusion is certainly not incidental. It is a concerted choice being made to manipulate a very difficult material.
And it's not the only such case of this happening. So they have a number of cremations also within this landscape.
There's something really dynamic about fire, which we can all agree on.
That's and the dynamism of this is reflected in the deposition of cremated materials in the Neolithic in the Bronze Age.
There are so many different ways that cremations are looked after and deposited.
Yet still, in every instance,
there is one commonality which I can find that the deceased individual traverses unknown parts in dust with plant materials selected by communities.
So the mortuary space is obviously primarily occupied by the task.
That's the purpose. But wisdom always of the products of life, often of subsistence.
Obviously, mortuary practices are more reflective of the values of living communities.
Cremation pyres are highly controlled spaces transitory.
Not only in terms of the deceased, but also the attendees.
Another stage of life without the person devalued.
Now there's a number of examples of this, but I've just selected two, so we've got ten.
Craig Wood And that we have various human cremation contained in pits, one pits to one cremation and one individual.
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,
aspects which they would have seen every day and would have meant something to these people.
So I also have you should. WEST This one is a bit different because actual military structures were built
and underwent intentional incineration at the same time as the human cremation.
So they were built almost little temples. Now in these examples, stars Byrd, Cherry Stone's Hazelnut Shell and Rowan Seeds.
Not all of these examples are edible in any sense of the word, but they're still included.
That suggests that it's not just subsistence, which motivates the choice of votive offerings in cremation profiles.
Clients had other meaning beyond this.
So there are many cultures in which the curated space of a cremation event aligns physically with a transition into another metaphysical space.
Existence in some aspect continues an existence, not necessarily meaning life.
Existence in all its forms, however, seems to require natural products and subsistence.
Otherwise, these cremation spacious are lines of communication with deceased attendees and somehow a
being whereby plants are very valuable in such a capacity not only as tools of subsistence,
but potentially symbolically, or even as a direct presentation of the landscape.
The environment embodied in natural objects,
a kind of exchange of information between the unknown and unknown, but respected at every stage of existence.
The communities of East Lothian Coastal Plain. There are deep connections between occupied spaces, natural objects and ritualised processes.
Japan knows the epicentre, the linchpin of this network of sites, this network of ritual sites.
And later is the occupation based centre for tasks in the environs is situated on a lack of list,
which is a very unique landform, the volcanic landform.
And it is the highest point for Miles, which again feeds into the visibility theory.
Now, this is evidence of Neolithic activity on the summit.
This is cut and ring and linear and lozenge and Chevron rock markings and rock carvings across the summit.
Some of these were damaged beyond repair in the 1962 quarrying.
Others were incorporated into later Iron Age structures.
And we still find them now.
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.
So it's not fair. That motive that motivates a choice of place is instead appreciation of the landscape and knowledge of the landscape,
not disconnection, but a brilliant form of connection.
It is just a marshy hole in the ground, but in this marshy holding the ground was an amazing variety of natural objects.
And I did the analysis on these objects. It's mostly in terms of cereals, barley and some wheat.
But this is a significant offering.
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.
So even beyond this, if it's not high status, then it's someone giving something which means a lot to them.
Votive offerings are unfortunately often thought of as having to be shiny, and in this case, they're not.
They are natural objects which have value on their own and in terms of subsistence as reflected by the other sites discussed.
But by depositing these objects within the diffused boundaries that conduct our water,
not only are communities providing some form of eternity with a known unknown,
they're communicating then knowledge with the natural context in a tangible, tactile capacity.
Who is listening to these messages? The sending is an uncertainty.
But what is clear is that it mattered to communities that their connection to the natural world understood the natural objects.
Supply communities are indicators of environments as such, when they are associated with ritual contexts and indeed some aspects of magic.
A new meaning emerges in those practices that has long been an act of the so-called primitive communities,
fearing the environmental situation, a negative association or connotation to pain law.
We not only see the inverse of this, but a complex dynamic is revealed.
Japan managed its environmental context in a ritualised capacity and employed symbolic associations with plant remains
and offerings and solution identity of place through plants which may have been used to communicate across boundaries.
I am no closer to a definition of ancient since.
However, I continue to note that these communities have knowledge of natural objects within the very foundations
demonstrated in nearly every action that their partner in subsistence and moving was the natural world.
There was nothing wrong with their site. The Google of their existence is not the natural world.
These were the pioneer naturalists, after all. Thank you.
Thank you very much for presenting what's actually, at this point in the conference,
a fantastic upending of many things that have been perhaps too easily agreed.
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.
She is a second year Ph.D. student at the University of Exeter,
being supervised by Daniel Ogden, whose work I'm pretty sure is familiar to everyone here.
Her thesis focuses on the night, which as a broad motif in Roman history from the first century BCE to the second century CE.
I now welcome Nora and ask her to begin her presentation.
Hello, everyone. Thank you all for coming. I will examine how Roman poets utilised and support mundane and sometimes well known
contemporary locations to create imagined landscapes for their supernatural tales.
I will also analyse how the character's interactions with these landscapes affect the narrative.
Horace's satire 1.8 creates an interesting interplay between comedy and horror in an imagined version of a well-known graveyard landscape.
Our narrator, a carved statue of the fertility and horticultural God Pre episode details how during the
night he watches the grave stalking terrifying which is an idea is to garner well prepared.
His story is written to be comic.
His description of how these which has used the landscape to undertake their evil practices, creates horror and revulsion in the reader.
Perhaps his monologue is also helpful in detailing how the landscape has been changed over time.
As Rome's Swan Hill has become a sought after area, it is transformed into a place of culture and refinement.
Under Augustus's confidante and Horace's patron,
Aeneas and the old eyesores of the suburban landscape are swallowed up by progress and renovated by the wealthy patron, or,
as his choice of location for his tale of witchcraft makes the story of subverted landscapes and supernatural
happenings all the more interesting as it is a real sight that a contemporary reader would be aware of.
Private business charge my seniors. This Gardens has had its original function altered.
No longer is it a mass grave for slaves and those that cannot afford to do little else
than have friends and loved ones brought here in a cheap box and haphazardly buried.
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,
has become a site of residential homes and leisure for those still living.
Although the landscape may have been transformed from the typical liminal space
in which one might expect shades in the bodies of the dead after nightfall.
This change is reverted by those who desire to use it for its original purpose.
Specifically,
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
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.
They are set to dig down into the soil using only their fingernails, presumably to expose the poorly and humid remains,
porous labourers to create an inhuman and animalistic depiction of the pair, particularly Nadia.
She is described as wandering barefoot through the garden and howling at the moon.
Maybe the most visceral example is how the witches are described as conducting their ritual slaughter to contact the spirits of the dead.
They rip apart a lamb with their teeth in their newly dug trench and let blood trickle down onto the ground.
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,
particularly one of the tales in Petronius,
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.
While the pair cause less human suffering in this poem, their mastery over the dead through rituals and potions,
forcing spirits from their slumber is very much what we would expect from the witches of Greco-Roman literature.
It is quite interesting that the landscape in which the narrative takes place is merely a horticultural sight.
But through inflicting suffering and impious acts, Nadia can undo its transformation and revert it to a grim and macabre cemetery.
In the end, Krieps is able to comically scare them off out of his garden,
despite his inability to move when the wood he has carved from splits loudly down the buttocks of the statue.
Creating such a resonant sound that the witches scatter. Dropping their false teeth is brilliant too.
Welcome, everyone, to the third day of the magic and the sense of place conference.
Sue Alice Huxley is a doctoral student in her third year at Oxford University at Saint John's College,
researching the relationship between folklore and literature and placed across the 18th and 19th centuries.
And she's going to be talking to us about 18th century fairies in Kensington Gardens before Barry.
So I hand over now to the first panellist Alice Huxley.
Thank you very much for being here. If you walk around the recreational, like in Kensington Garden, a public park in London,
you'll come across this statue of the boy who wouldn't grow up.
J.M. Barrie, the inventor of Peter Pan,
commissioned the statue in arranging for workmen to install it behind awning so that when the awning was taken down,
Peter Pan would appear as if by magic. Today, if people associate Kensington Gardens with fairies, it is likely because of the Peter Pan.
But Barry himself lived in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens and took regular walk through the park with his enormous Saint Bernard.
His first Peter Pan book describes the fairies and other magical creatures who come out to play in Kensington Gardens.
After the gates are locked. Even in the late to Peter Pan novel set predominantly in the Neverland,
Peter Pan tells the Darling Children that he once ran away to Kensington Gardens to live among the fairies.
Barry's fame, both during and after his lifetime, has included earlier works of Barry literature set in Kensington Gardens.
In fact, the site's association with Barry's precedes the invention of Peter Pan by almost two centuries.
This paper situates Barry is the inheritor, not the inventor of the pre-existing mythology of the place.
By turning to the best known depiction of Kensington Fairies.
A 1721 poem by Thomas Tickell. Takeda was a member of the biggest intellectual circle surrounding Joseph Addison,
a group of writers who enjoyed commercial and critical success in their own time but were afterwards relegated to the status of minor poets.
A number of recent scholars, including Abigail Williams, have called for a reassessment of literary output.
Kensington Garden is one such poem which warrants renewed critical attention.
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.
So people and parties that convention, by providing an origin story for a limited patch, according to Kells poem,
describes the romantic and political conflicts that cause the downfall of the fairy quote, which supposedly once existed on the site.
To give you a brief overview of the plot, the immortal Fairy Princess Kenna falls in love with Albion, who,
while boasting impressive ancestors, including Neptune, is still mortal, born to a human mother and stolen by the fairies as an infant.
When Kenneth's father, King Oberon, discovers their relationship, he banishes Albion and marries Kenneth with Barry instead.
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,
then jump forward to the early 18th century, when McKenna, who is already given her name to Kensington,
inspires the royal gardener, Henry Wise, to construct the sunken terrace.
Wise unconsciously recreates the layout of the fallen fairy city in the design of the garden.
Why fairies and why mockery? So first batteries.
It is unlikely that Tickell was basing his poem on a pre-existing folk tale about the fight, despite the claims of his narrator.
Otherwise, for one thing, the sunken terrace had only existed for about 16 or 17 years by the time it teakettle broke the poem.
And for another, it was possible to boil complex about the very folk you might circulate stories about.
Is it that seems reasonable to assume that Tickhill invented its third tradition?
And I would suggest for political purpose to tell was drawing on a widespread association between royalty and fairies
that spanned both oral and literary traditions that appeared in folktales about fairy kings and queens in the Inchon,
tresses of Medieval Romance and an early modern text such as Edmund Spenser's, The Faerie Queene.
Cycle adapted this fictional convention to flatter the Barbarian Monarchy.
He was at the heart of a Whig establishment that had been broadly supportive of George the best claim to the throne,
and he had already written several poems championing The Canterbury Fools by giving them the fairy treatment and Kensington Garden.
It was thus situating them in a British landscape and cultural tradition at a time when their detractors view them as foreign interlopers.
This poem about Kensington Garden seems to flatter one mysterious member of the court.
In particular. It opens not in the ancient days of the Faerie City,
but in the 18th century present with a description of the fashionable promenades that became a renowned feature of the garden during the period.
Six lines are devoted to a complimentary portrayal of one parading noblewoman introduced as England's daughter darling of the land.
So when I first set out to identify this anonymous figure, I had five main criteria based on a textual evidence of the poem.
Firstly, and most obviously, the noblewoman must have participated in the Promenades Arts.
Secondly, she must fit the description of England's metaphorical parents.
Thirdly, she must be notably tall, as she's described, towering over her companions.
Fourthly, there must be a plausible reason for how to write about her in the political context of 1721.
And finally, she should ideally have some relevance to the wider subject.
The poem. So here are the most likely contenders from the royal court.
George, the first daughter by his ex-wife, was Sophia Dorothea of Hanover.
Sophia was notably tall, fulfilling the third criteria, but she spent little time in England, let alone Kensington Palace.
We can discounter adequately. The Victorian man of letters, Lea Hunt, instead took the poem as alluding to George,
the first daughter in North Carolina, whom he credited with initiating the promenades.
Caroline Beck will meet the first criteria and possibly also the fourth criteria,
as she had recently brought about a reconciliation between George the first and George Augustus.
On the other hand,
the reconciliation had been transparently halfhearted and to Celts perhaps unlikely to write a flattering poem about Caroline in the 1720s,
after five or six years of an uneasy relationship with the King George,
the first was supposedly in the habit of calling her the devil, Madam Princess.
We can also take George the Fest's other daughters out of contention,
even though they participated in the Kensington Promenades while George the best, lived openly with his mistress.
Now you've seen Wanda shooting in bed that children would not acknowledge as legitimate
for fear of overstepping the amount of controversy which the public would tolerate.
Instead, the three daughters were presented as Medici's nieces.
So it's unlikely that two wrote about any one of them in particular.
I would therefore like to put forward George the best distressed, seen as an alternative, very thin, anonymous noblewoman.
This reading requires a different but textually supported interpretation of England's daughter as simply the country's darling.
She undoubtedly fulfils the best criteria.
She resided in Kensington Palace and participates in the promenades while she was so renowned for her extraordinary height.
The nickname among the English population was the maypole.
Melusine also meets the fourth criteria to count as a supporter of the Hanoverian
monarchy and a compelling reason for betraying her in a flattering light.
In the early 1720s, her public image was in dire need of repair, while some members of the English state public sector terrorists,
the de facto queen, had detractors criticised her sharply in the press,
a commentary often exacerbated by a combination of age, sexist and xenophobic prejudices not merely seen as old,
unattractive and greedy as a parasite who'd come to drain the country's coffers.
Some complained that she wielded too much power as an unofficial mediator between petitioners and the king.
Others criticised her involvement in the South Sea Company, the collapse of which in 1720 caused a financial crash in Britain.
Tacos poem can therefore be read as a proof of fairness.
A The flexible access aspects of the public image debate.
It provides a reputation while delicately minimising a perceived power, presenting her outside in the gardens,
participating in a frivolous promenade instead of manipulating the chains behind closed doors.
She might explain the varied subject of the poem.
She shares the name with one of the aristocratic, alluring fairies of European folklore and the medieval prose romance scene.
The titular character is cast to transform into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.
She marries on the condition that her husband will never see her on a Saturday.
But after years of marriage, he breaks his promise and appears through the keyhole.
While she bends the betrayed Melusine transforms into a dragon and flies away.
This supernatural figure might seem like a strange namesake for members of the early modern nobility.
However, Melusine is never just a monster in the romance text.
She is devoted, capable and inserted into real world genealogies.
Is the founding matriarch of the house of Luce in a house that rules various principalities in Europe.
And that happened during the late medieval period.
George, the first mistress, was probably named Medici because the monarchy was associated with dynastic power as well as magic.
In the poem, Kenna's undying devotion to Albion can be read as a sympathetic commentary on Maliki's relationship,
both to George the First and to the nation at large. Albion is, of course, also an ancient name for Britain.
There's a discrepancy between the story and the reality of the garden early on in Kensington Garden,
to give a misleading impression that is buried authentically derives from the British tradition.
By ascribing them the expected characteristics, they dance from sunlight, still human children and for more domestic cleanliness, the silver coins.
As the plot unfolds, however, his fairies are not engaged in the more traditional activities of.
When fairies variously reward, trick or punish human beings, sometimes helping them in domestic tasks,
sometimes leading them into Barry Hills to participate in the kind of sweeping conflict found in classical epic Tokyo draws
attention to the incongruity between their size and behaviour by arming them with humorously small weapons that burn spears,
for instance, resemble rows of needles.
Finally, instead of seamlessly combining English diaries and classical deities in the same work to help find humour in their jarring interactions.
Despite what the name suggests, 18th century Wilderness Gardens were not designed to look like wild natural spaces,
but to demonstrate the designer's ability to contain nature within hedges and zones.
Creating sheltered walkways where visitors could lose themselves in intellectual and personal contemplation.
Kensington Garden is a little remembered work of literature today.
Nevertheless, it proved surprisingly influential over the 18th and 19th centuries,
reprinted in multiple volumes over the period, as well as in collections of 2000 work.
A number of Victorian local historians keen to ascribe a mythical back story to Kensington, repeated the claim that its name,
derived from a fairy princess called Canna their readers to sit in Kensington
Gardens and enchant their surroundings by reimagining two palace fairies,
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,
allow themselves to drift backwards, backwards to that remote period when fairies gambles on the silence.
A golden age when all men were brave and honest and all women fair and true.
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,
and clustering around the dwelling place of their monarch with a crowded streets and glittering spires of the capital of the fairy empire.
As late as 1983, a new comic opera based on a poem opened at the Savoy Theatre,
demonstrating that it continued to have a cultural afterlife in the period when J.M. Barrie was writing his Peter Pan works.
Frustratingly, we don't know for certain whether Barry had to come in.
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,
19th and 20th century riffs onto Cal's work shortly after the publication of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
A contributor to notes and queries group Tickle and Barry together as the Mythologised Barry Bonds of Kensington.
This story has broader implications for the ways in which we understand the relationship between real and imagined histories of place.
The physical characteristics of the Paris Informed 2002 mythology and the ensuing theory tradition changed the built environment of the public park.
Visitors today can see the Peter Pan statue play in the Peter Pan themed playground on the cut out an oak installation,
a car tree stump decorated with barriers and woodland creatures.
These complicated interactions between tangible and intangible heritage encourage us to look beyond disciplinary boundaries,
not just between periods of time, but between literature, folklore, art, history and geography.
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much.
I think a whole new world said to me and I think I probably speak for everyone.
Now we're going to hear from Tom Bullock. Todd Bullock is senior lecturer in Renaissance drama at the University of Huddersfield.
His research interests include Shakespeare and the pre-history of environmentalism,
magic and Science, Repertory and performance studies and Global Shakespeare.
He's the author of Eco Criticism and Early Modern English Literature,
Green Pastures and Literature and Nature in the Renaissance and Eco Critical and Theology, as well as over a dozen articles in journals.
All right. Thank you, Diane. So my paper today is on the Witch of Edmonton, one of the great Jacobean witchcraft plays.
And I'm going to focus on it as a play about wetlands.
Wetlands have long been a bastion of magical beliefs.
Anyone who caught Alexandra and Diane's paper yesterday will not need much convincing that a whiff of the supernatural clippings about these places,
as surely as the pungent stench of stagnant water.
But back in the Anglo-Saxon era, the author of Beowulf tars Grendel's mother as a mere cliff or torn hag.
While the night entry hagiography of Saint Pathak recounts his battles with misshapen bin dwelling demons.
And Tales of here at the Wake.
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.
And in the Jacobean period, the weird sisters help broth includes the fillets of a funny snake.
And of course, Caliban conjures infections from the fans to blast Prospero.
In a 6019 protest ballad entitled The Police Complaint,
the author calls upon all this Neptune in the moon to curse the developers that seek to drain and enclose the wetlands.
Meanwhile on the continent, the Punchline Martius in Italy at the foot of Mount Cicero,
have long been linked with a sorceress thirsty for Bacchus antiquity.
It's easy to fathom why magical beliefs would prove particularly pernicious in these sparsely populated backwaters.
Not only were schools and churches few and far between,
but rituals involving sympathetic magic would satisfy a deep yearning to exert some control over an unstable environment prone to flooding.
Moreover, diseases afflicting humans and cattle are commonplace and the absence of germ theory.
Finland communities desperate to find a scapegoat would be easily tempted to attribute an otherwise inexplicable outbreak to witchcraft.
Now medical minded historians have proffered dozens of ingenious explanations for witchcraft and attempts that often
betray the incapacity of the scientific mind to comprehend why the widespread faith in magic in pre-modern societies.
Confessions of witchcraft, if not extracted under torture, must have been often assumed,
prompted by some psychotic episode brought on by ergot fungus poisoning, syphilis, Huntington's disease, Lyme disease, dementia, etc.
Now, it's not the intent of this paper today to propose a reductive,
magic bullet explanation to debunk a phenomenon that's linked with a vast complex of socio cultural forces,
spiritual traditions and environmental factors. But if we turn from mythical and universal explanations of witchcraft to ask why it thrived
in particular locales and the prevalence of magic in wetlands doesn't hurt further inquiry.
Modern appreciation of wetlands has developed in the absence of a serious, often fatal disease that they want spawned.
While malaria disappeared from the UK around the end of the First World War and it's now classed as an imported disease.
It was once endemic in low lying areas along fens, marshes and estuaries.
The reason we still seldom think of it in early modern England is that the mosquito a Spanish
loan word first recorded in 1572 and only gradually adopted masqueraded as the fly or nets.
While the word malaria borrowed from the Italian in 1740 was disguised under the term ague.
The Ague could refer to any fever in general.
But descriptions of Persian or cotton fevers, which flare up every third or fourth day, occur frequently in early modern texts.
And they correspond exactly with the symptoms of Plasmodium vivax, a fever every other day, and Plasmodium malaria, a fever every 72 hours.
William Harvey, the esteemed physician, suffered from malaria, as did Samuel peeps.
And Oliver Cromwell contracted these Persian fevers. Daniel Defoe left a very colourful account of its virulence in the Essex marshes.
Precise epidemiological data is, of course, hard to come by for the early modern era.
But parish records indicate considerably higher rates of mortality near Marsh's favoured breeding
grounds of the NFL is after a part of us that no mosquito capable of transmitting malaria.
But as its etymology suggests, early moderns blamed malaria on bad air.
But as far back as 1666, the physician, Thomas Sydenham,
wrote a detailed study on Persian fevers and drew a correlation between outbreaks and spikes in insect populations.
When insects form extraordinarily, then egg use and contains up here early about midsummer and the autumn proves very quickly.
Most people prior to 1666, however, assumed that darker forces were at work.
It's probably not coincidental that areas with extensive wetlands, such as the Fens, Essex, Kent,
Somerset and the Ribble Valley in Lancashire witnessed disproportionately large numbers of witchcraft trials.
Is it possible?
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,
that the swellings caused by mosquito bites might in some cases have been mistaken for
the infamous witch's teat in which they allegedly suckled their familiars with blood.
The connection between wetlands, malaria and witchcraft offers a fresh angle in which to view the wish of Edmondson.
A good deal of commentary on this could be in place to determine whether it debunks
witchcraft and decries Sawyer's execution or gleefully exploits her grisly fate,
birth entertainment value and colludes with misogyny and ageism.
Another strand of scholarship focuses on the gender politics of the domestic tragedy,
often attempting to clarify the linkages between the three plotlines focussed on respectively the bigamist Frank Thorney,
the Witch Mother Sawyer and the clown Cody Banks.
Little attention has been paid to the place. Environmental context.
17th century Edmonton stood alongside substantial wetlands over a half mile wide on the Western Bank of the River Lee.
A number of wetlands still in Girdle Edmonton to this day. Ramsey Marsh and Waltham O.
Marsh spread out along its northern edges and Tottenham and Hackney Marshes lie to its south.
The only reason we have forgotten about Edmondson Marsh is that much of it was
obliterated by the construction of a series of reservoirs in the early 20th century.
Jacoby in Edmonton, however,
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.
Mother Sawyer resided near winch more hill on the western fringe of Edmonton,
putting her in the vicinity of two such tributaries which I've shown here with the Blue Arrows,
a Simons Brook to the north and more brook to itself through the tendency of water to stagnant and slow flowing watercourses.
The severely polluted Moore Brook was converted and buried in the 1950s,
but in the early 17th century it was essentially an open sewer and an ideal habitat for malaria breeding mosquitoes.
Dean. In the light of environmental history,
it seems revealing that the Witch of Edmonds and Associates Mother Sawyer with dirty foul water in her first appearance in the play.
Just because she happens to be poor, deformed and ignorant, complains the people of Edmonds and malign her as a witch.
Must I for that be made a common sink for all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues to fall and run into?
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.
The metaphor may have been suggested by the near homophones of Sawyer and Sewer,
but she complicates this by tracing the source of filth back to the community, back to her slanderous accusers.
If the common sink is unsanitary, it's because the people have befouled it.
By the same token, if she is a witch,
the townsfolk have driven her to it by their constant recrimination because all one to be a witch must be counted.
One, she says. Now. Sink could also signify a low lying area where the flowing water collects and forms.
It could be a marsh, a pool, a wetlands. Meaning that dates back to 1594, according to the OED.
Whichever reading we prefer.
The speech frames the presence of the witch in the community as analogous to an unhealthy cesspool or marsh afflicting the people with disease.
They claim that she or speaks her cattle or speaks their cattle for which the corn themselves, their servants and their babies.
That nurse. I'm sorry. I got of. An insightful reading of the play.
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.
What would Wilson think as a reference to the sinful womb and never considers what sicknesses might have been endemic in Edmonton in 1620?
Don Fisher similarly reflects upon the play a sense of a correspondence between
dirty water and women's bodies supposedly tainted by inspiration in childbirth.
Revisiting this witchcraft play with an invite with an eye on environmental history
is a place one could add that it intensifies another literal source of contagion
in stagnant and polluted wetlands and watercourses that actually stood alongside
Edmundson in the 17th century and would have been an incubator for malaria.
Now the parish records of All Saints Edmondson, now in the London Metropolitan Archive,
do not record causes of death, but archival evidence confirms that AGU was present there in the early 17th century.
Don Clark, in his Trumpet of Apollo, touts his ague remedies and directs readers to persons who can vouch for their efficacy.
Observing that Mistress lead dwelling with Mistress Brett and her mother at Edmonton, having had a double contained a long time, was cured.
In areas where marsh fever was rife, many would have turned to quacks over the folk remedies peddled by wise women or cunning men.
But those who had lost loved ones or precious cattle might blame vulnerable, disreputable people on the social margins for having cursed them.
Is therefore ironic as well as tragic that Elizabeth Sawyer herself would have known this grief, this loss all too well.
I discovered, to my shock in the archives last week of her 11 children, six of them died in infancy.
The daughter named after her died upon Christmas 1597 at the age of one.
The following May a boy, Ambrose, did not live through his first day in 1602.
This is the year again that reports an AGU in Edmonton or suffers a unspeakable series of losses.
Her two year old son, William, and two day old daughter Joanna.
Both die on the same day, April 9th. Six weeks later, Joanna's twin sister, Mary, died.
Well, I was almost crying in the archives. A number of factors such as that malnourishment could have contributed to these premature deaths.
But three and two months in the same household smacks of a transmissible disease,
and the presence of marshes and polluted water around Edmonton points to a disease that's water borne or carried by water breeding insects.
Many adults recover from malaria, but the young do not fare so well.
Malaria is known to trigger a devastating uptick in infant and child mortality, and infections during pregnancy often result in stillbirth.
The inhabitants of Jacobean London were well aware of the health risks posed by clogged urban waterways,
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.
Dekker observes that standing water does nothing but gather corruption.
News from Gravesend, co-written with Thomas Middleton, blames plague on bad air sucked from stand in pools from bogs from rank in Derbyshire
Fens solve this problem and supply a rapidly expanding London with clean water.
The authorities had launched an ambitious hydro engineering project in the first decade of King James reign.
The New River, which piped fresh water for amble springs near where to?
The conduit, working well in north London. And this was delved through the western edge of Edmonton.
The project was spearheaded by mining baron Hugh Middleton, supported by King James,
but encountered fierce opposition from local landowners who feared that diverting channels through
their farmland would create quagmires that might drown cattle and of course spread disease.
Despite these qualms, the New River was completed in 16, 13 and six years later,
the New River Company was incorporated by a royal charter, which makes it a criminal offence to dump rubbish into the river.
Passage of this act suggests that pollution was a recognised problem in the New River in 1619, shortly before Sawyer was convicted.
It invites us to interpret her persecution of the ritual cleansing of a befouled waterway,
or think it's therefore striking that the New River was cut right through when more hill,
the western flank of Edmundson, where Sawyer resided, introducing more water into an already sodden, flood prone area.
When the Witch of Edmonton was first staged,
the community at the apex would have been anxious about outsiders interfering with the white ones in their midst.
While Londoners were increasingly conscious of the reliance upon the northern suburbs
for clean water and would have been concerned by reports of outbreaks of witchcraft,
of disease or witchcraft conjured diseases in places upstream such as Edmonton.
Interestingly, Mother's story is not the only person compared to putrid water in the play before.
It's another transcript. Analogy between bodies and what one's in the bigamy plot.
When Frank Naughty exclaims, presumably while pounding on his chest.
Or Here, here is the thin when which this hydra of discontent grows rank occurring in the very next scene,
after Sawyer's comparison of herself to a polluted think, the motive of filthy water serves to bind together the plotlines.
The domestic tragedy plot in which Frank Thorne is compelled to marry Susan to secure a dowry.
Despite having already wed, Winifred exposes the pervasive greed of the middle classes depicted in the play.
More precisely, it's the cash strapped Gentry's greed for land of the acres owned by the yeoman
farmer Carter that pressures Thorney to obey his father and marry Carter's daughter.
The fame, hunger for land and her 17th century is driving the reclamation projects to drain and destroy the wetlands.
The allusion here to learning Hydra may be classical,
but these ominous references to wetlands as monstrous spaces conspire with these efforts to drain and enclose the wetlands.
It is therefore somewhat curious that Sawyer's most bitter enemy in the play is a man named Banks.
No person of that name appears in the play.
Source The wonderful discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer by assigning her nemesis the name banks with its connotations of embankments.
The playwright's famous conflict between them, not only in terms of rich versus poor and men versus women,
also is an elemental struggle between drylands and wetlands.
Giving the aspects of a fitful environmental allegory. And so your first scene banks confronts her and accuses her of trespassing.
What makes, though upon my ground so explained, she's gathering a few rotten sticks to warm me.
An exchange that captures the stark realities of early modern fuel poverty.
But the uncharitable banks drives away the old woman who has just been compared
to dirty water with verbal and physical violence hanging out of my ground.
The word ground appears a third time when Stoya declares banks is the ground of all my scandal.
And in the ensuing scene during his outburst about the fin within him is prompted by Susan's
innocent request to know the ground of his disturbance or the deliberately or subconsciously.
The play draws a recurrent contrast between dry ground versus watery commons,
associating the latter with a guilt stricken bigamist and a curse in which.
The belief that marshes might be controlled through magical incantations is voiced in another
place set in Edmonton and titled The Merry Devil of Edmonton features a titular magus,
Peter Fable, who boasts he could conjure a flutter along the river.
Lea Well, first hand in field and such rings of mist has never rose from any Derbyshire stand.
I'll make the buried seed arise wherein drown the marshes under the bridge.
Beecher envisions brackish water surging southward from where in Hertfordshire,
towards north London to the marshes here would include those in and around Edmondson.
Amidst the floods, we're blamed for disease outbreaks. Speech has decidedly sinister overtones.
This, beyond the lost of a few twigs, is the situation that the paranoid banks is trying to prevent.
When he expels soya from his ground, behaving like actual banks constructed to hold back the creeks and marsh.
Although Sawyer never conjures a flood per say, she does manage to temporarily drown.
Banks, the son, Cody Banks, in a comic scene memorably depicted on the title page of the 1621 play text.
When Cuddy asks the witch to help him seduce Kate Carter, she tells him to follow her dog.
Are familiar. Who will lead him to the girl?
Instead, the dog whom Cuddy identifies as the water spaniel, leads him into an unnamed body of water up to his neck.
Katie cries offstage, Help. I'm drowned. I'm drowned. See here on the title page.
And immediately after the stage direction. 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 and which we might buy a benign recreation of sacrificial drownings and ancient rainmaking rituals.
After all, Katie is adorned in the costume of a morris dancer in the scene,
which some historians and early modern Puritans trace back to pre-Christian fertility rights.
The scene also stages a reversal of the ducking of the width, which cut here seems to allude to many complaints.
Let's have no more of these ducking devices. But he survived this ordeal.
But the scene does play on fears of thinking and flooding in marshland communities.
Audiences in 1621 familiar with the topography of Greater London would have likely
inferred that Curry has been plunged into the marshes at the edge of Edmonton.
Black magic cannot bring marsh to the town. It brings the townsfolk through and into the marsh.
Which of Edmonton also furnishes evidence that early modern believed witches were vectors for malaria like illnesses.
The theme that anticipates Wordsworth's beauty Blake and Harry Bill for your curses plagues not with an eternal chill,
but with physical pain by bones. They joints, cramp, convulsions, breath and crack.
They sinews along with fever and chills. Muscle and joint pain are among the most common conspicuous symptoms of malaria.
Bone loss and periodontitis are also characteristic of chronic malaria, which forensic archaeologists can detect through skeletal deterioration.
This supports the conjecture that Sawyer may have suffered from malaria herself since good kill reports in the pamphlet.
She was crooked and deformed, even bending together as illustrated by the portrait of her on the title page of both the
pamphlet in the play and the playwrights compare it to a a bow buckled and bent together.
Malaria patients also frequently develop anaemia.
And good call. Describe Sonja's complexion as pale and ghostlike, without any blood at all.
Unsightly appearance would have led the people of 17th century Edmonton to conclude she was afflicted with a disfiguring disease,
while the dread that it was transmissible was seemingly borne out by the fact so many of her own children had died.
No wonder she was shunned and hated like a sickness.
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.
Banks accusations of an abuse drives voyeurs into indulging in revenge fantasies.
Diseases, plagues, the curses of an old woman follow and fall upon you.
50 lines later, she repeats the similar curse. Rocks and formalities eat up and die.
Retaliating with these curses echoes the invectives of the deformed Caliban.
All the infections of the sun sucks up from fogs, bends, flat, sun, prosper, fall and his first appearance in the play,
Caliban has implied that his mother gathered wicked due from an unwholesome fen,
a practice malavika, and the people of Edmonton seem to suspect mother saw Europe doing the same.
But rather than sprinkle wicked do from a raven feather wand who dispatches her dog who bewitch the townsfolk by touching them.
Play here, I think, taps into fears of tho Nordic transmission of diseases like malaria in early modern England.
The archival research that undergirds this paper, the just mother story.
It may have been both a factor and a victim of malaria,
and knowing that she not only suffered physical pain, but the psychological trauma of losing six children.
Further, what the Jacobean playwrights flirt with, but far away from her elevation to tragic stature.
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.
Research on ethnographic research in Africa has shown that it's very common for malaria to be blamed on black magic.
Researchers in Gambia found a malaria was attributed to bruja or witches who
are believed to conjure a foul wind to seek the life force of the bewitched.
But magic and science aren't mutually exclusive and places like West or South Africa.
A survey of the advocacy in Kenya revealed that while 80% accept that mosquitoes can be a vector, 34% still attribute malaria to witchcraft.
And the family in Cameroon subscribed to the notion that witches can infect people with disease,
but also tell an ideological myth that malaria arrived in the community when a thief switched a bag,
supposed to contain the ancestors blessings with a bag full of mosquitoes.
Many medical studies lament the supposed persistence of such beliefs and assume if people were better educated,
they would seek proper Western treatments rather than consult witchcraft.
Which doctors? Well, well, meaning?
Such studies can be, of course, patronising based on quack remedies and anti-scientific sentiments persist in the ostensibly enlightened West,
as COVID 19 is made painfully clear.
And historians of magic, I think, would do well to keep this in mind when drawing on ethnographic studies of witchcraft from outside Europe.
Comparisons between contemporary rural Africa and early modern England can unwittingly imply that the former remains mired in a primitive,
pre-modern past. But it's easy to trouble such assumptions with a thought experiment or a show of hands.
How many of you among us today have seen a microscopic app, a complex and protozoan parasite?
Imagine trying to explain Plasmodium vivax to inhabitant of Edmonton in 1621.
Why not say demon anthropologist to treat these folks properly, seriously?
And the same goes for historians of magic. Proposing a link between malaria and Malavika in early modern England,
this paper is not so much a plea for disenchantment as a provocation to think more about how
our understanding of witchcraft can be enriched by eco medical eco feminist approaches.
Thank you.
Amy Blakemore is a novelist whose first novel, The Manningtree Witches, actually managed to appeal to me as an accurate representation of witchcraft.
It would be great to hear from Amy if she's ready to comment.
I am a Blakemore for Amy, my debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, which came out a couple of years ago now.
I can never quite remember when precisely because of the kind of dilatory COVID time that we went through,
but is about the early career of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder general in Manningtree.
Manningtree is a place I know very well, a small town in Essex.
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.
I'm sure a lot of you would have passed through it on your way to vastly more metropolitan Norwich.
And yes, a place I know well because my dad was there. So I'm down there kind of a few times a year.
And real and imagined history as a phrase is something that's very interesting to me,
because one of the things that sort of interested me most when I began writing the
novel was almost less the story itself and more the way the history and in fact,
the myth of the witch find a general has been transformed and revised by Manningtree and its inhabitants.
The last time I was down in Manningtree, I was giving a talk to a local book group at the Thorne of Mossley,
which of course historically, although it's disputed was the in the which find a general himself orange and brown.
It's still there and it's now fairly boujee gastropub with some rooms above.
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.
And I was talking to the barman and he was discussing the book.
They sell little postcards of the frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins book, and he said,
I love taking people when they're staying at the pub to the room upstairs where he died.
And I was kind of, oh, there's a room that he supposedly died in. Which one?
And he says, well, whichever one they're staying in,
obviously every Halloween in the high streets of Manningtree, there is a witch finding competition.
And what this involves is Barbie dolls wearing little felts,
which hats that are left around the centre of town and the local children are exhorted to find them.
The information about this, the signs put up in shop windows and stuff.
Very, very careful to stress that you are finding them.
To save them. From Matthew Hawkins, the witch trying to general rather than to subject them to carceral violence as a sort of
equivocal ditty about the way that Manningtree interacts with its history in this regard.
Manningtree is now pretty much a commuter town.
It's very sparse, quiet, and has a slightly.
It's a very nebulous term. But coast energy, I would say, as so many small towns in England do.
Matthew Watkins was, I think, most memorably portrayed by Vincent Price and the Witchfinder film,
which is I'm kind of a massive fan of sixties, seventies schlock, folk horror.
So obviously I love the Witch Find the film. The tagline for which was England has never looked so beautiful or been so evil.
And a great part of it was filmed in a village near Manningtree Laburnum, which, unlike all the POTENTE,
which is a fairly erect throw, sets yourself apart from the pack through her neck.
Dramatic power and inhuman behaviour. She is said to be wholly impious with the gods themselves,
granting her every horrific wish she desires simply so that she leaves them alone and lives as an embodiment of death.
Everywhere she steps, she blights the seed and the rich field, and her breath poisons the untainted air.
Through the extreme description of her action,
looking is able to embellish upon the existing trope of the dangerous, the silly in witches of Roman literature.
While the graveyards of any location are sombre places of sadness and emotional suffering,
these sites are transformed into [INAUDIBLE] scapes through the usage of space.
So has absolute dominion over these sites and calls them home and this imagined landscape.
She lives almost like a ghost, sleeping through the days in the tombs of the dead and only emerging after nightfall.
The fact that these tombs are occupied by the ghosts of those interred matters, not to someone powerful enough to attract them.
A graveyard, of course, would give a powerful necromancer the easy access they would need to the corpses needed to enact magic.
She does not limit herself to controlling the shades of the restless dead, but morbidly interferes with the cemeteries, corpses,
and even the living knowing and clawing at the flesh of corpses buried in the graveyard
like a scavenging dog or a wolf and chewing on the nooses that suspend those hanged,
removing appendages and eyes from those dried and sarcophagi.
And when a corpse is too difficult for her to rip up on her own, she snatches the morsels from the mouths of wolves.
Aside from using the corpses for her potions and presumably for sustenance,
she can whisper into the corpses, open mouth and send messages down to the underworld.
Of all this horror, this last use of the corpses is most interesting from the perspective of her interactions with the site.
The corpse itself becomes something more.
Through the intermediate status, it is balanced in a liminal status, both once a human and now no more than a vacant shell.
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.
In a grim manner of her ability to resurrect the dead from their tombs.
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.
She thus creates the restless, dead herself, when particularly evil and cruel shades are needed to do her deeds.
Worse still, she caused the throats of others and ripped the babies from their mother's wombs just to cremate them and altar fires.
She is living, being existing amongst the dead, described as a living corpse.
Absolute dominion over the balance between life and death,
able to force shades into the reanimated corpses and mock the fates by stealing the souls of the living.
Through physically interacting with what might be thought of as a civilised and safe setting, such as residential and horticultural landscapes.
Canada is able to unlock their latent necrotic potential by physically altering the landscape and enacting a bloody ritual in satire.
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.
In the case of Epic five, she employs commonplace objects from cemeteries as part of her murderous rite,
with the goal of blurring the line of reality and forcing supernatural power upon the human world,
employing the suffering and death of an innocent child to ensnare her lost lover psychologically.
Eric, though, also transforms the landscape in which her narrative is set through her interaction with it.
The facility and graveyards are used as a setting for her mockery of life and death.
Neither the living nor the dead are safe from a wreck. So stealing rest from spirits in the lives of those still breathing.
The potentially unsettling but wholly expected aspects of graveyards such as the tombs and corpses of the dead, are subverted through her actions.
The tombs become a domestic space for an inhuman and powerful witch,
and the lifeless shells that were once human are used to communicate with and control the spirits that they gave up.
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,
but not entirely of the world.
Powerful and malicious witches can utilise them to bend nature and further break the barriers that protect the predictable,
civilised and safe terrestrial world from the unpredictable and dangerous.
And that is my conclusion.
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.
And indeed, I want to ask her a question about her working.
My big question is really, what for you as a fantasy writer and a writer of historical fiction,
all the connections between your chosen settings and the way that you would begin to imagine the story.
You said to me earlier that you start with settings, but how do you find associated setting?
Mostly by spending a lot of time in them.
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,
it was because a very old friend of mine has a house there,
which she very generously gives us when we want it for a week or two or three or sometimes four to work.
And she's not using it. She's a banker. She works a lot.
And so we go up to Maine, along the coast in a region of archipelagos, which I love.
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.
This is a place that is giving me a lot of feelings about the landscape, about the light, about the extremes of temperature.
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.
And in the winter it is famously cold and full of snow.
And in early spring it is still extremely unpleasant.
Winter lasts a long time for America there. So I was reading a story that I remembered from my childhood called The Wizards Apprentice.
It was about an apprentice who was sold by his father to a wizard.
It's a Russian tale, and he goes through a number of adventures where the wizard is exploiting him and
has turned his previous apprentices into birds and stones and things like that.
So I took that fairy tale, which I had long been interested in,
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,
there are places that are very modern, and there are also places that could have been that way for the past 200 years.
So I took all of those things that I felt about Maine and I put them into that story.
So it is not a modern story because it takes place in a town where time does not actually operate very well.
That is outside of the rest of the world, outside of the rest of Maine.
And the mystery around that and the whole business with turning apprentices into farm animals,
which allowed me to have conversations when I was doing the research for it with a man
who hunts coyotes for a living and sells the tales and the pelts at the county fair.
And I talked to the guy who raised pigs, and he was, like I said,
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.
And he was like, I can tell you all about pigs.
And they're playful and they're intelligent and they play games with you.
And, you know, here's this large thing that we think that lies in the mud and grunts a lot and didn't know.
So all of that became all the meanness of Maine as I talked to people and stayed there and experienced
the weather and read things about Maine and read a book of the way people used to speak in Maine,
they don't so much anymore because like everything else, the regional accent has become terribly homogenised.
But there are still people who have those speech patterns.
Some of the regional expressions are very much of that time and very much of that place still.
So I just. Through it all into the hopper and made the book that I made.
There's also a large collection of people who were in Canada.
The French Huguenots moved into northern Maine, and so there's a large French speaking population, and possibly some of them were werewolves.
And there aren't any rules in Maine anymore. So now they're coyotes.
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.
So it all comes together that way. It tends to cohere around a place and the closeness of that place.
Okay. I almost want to say maybe other people have questions, too,
but I do have a number of follow up questions based on that really fascinating account as I read it,
a series of discoveries and noticed things as you move through and around the setting that started with an archipelago and the weather,
but increasingly became about talking to people and learning about the way that they had experienced the place that had fascinated you.
So there's something here, and this isn't in any way meant to be demeaning,
but it touches on many of the things we've been discussing about, I suppose, the role of the traveller in the landscape,
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,
usually because we've left it and come back. To what extent is that estrangement a precondition for noticing what might not strike?
Somebody who'd spent their entire life in Maine, for example,
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.
It's always like the sheer number of things that Mainers proverbial have to say about the weather makes it completely.
I mean, yes, they notice constantly. Okay.
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.
I was brought back when I was three to New York.
My parents were unusually elderly because I was adopted and they would not be allowed to adopt.
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.
So I am always a traveller and I'm actually quite happy with that because that allows
me to be an observer wherever I go and every place is slightly strange to me.
The place that is the most familiar is New York,
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,
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,
although we spent a year there a few years back before the pandemic, and I am currently writing about it.
It's a historical novel about the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris in the Commune.
And it was very important to me that the last time we were there,
which is three weeks ago when I was doing some research in the libraries that we live in my mouth,
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.
Sacré-coeur was built after the commune of Paris, mostly as a cock of the snook by the Church of France,
by the Catholic Church, to the secularist society that the commune wanted to set up.
And street names were changed, streets were torn down, buildings were built.
It was largely a farming community. It had only become part of Paris five years before.
So it was being on my mail tour and going to the museum and talking to the people and seeing the photographs
of what moments looked like during the late sixties and early seventies was really you needed to feel it,
you needed to feel and they still have cobblestones so you can feel.
But the streets feel like it's not like walking on pavement.
It's a different kind of cobblestones on the sidewalks and the sidewalks are only so wide and some of
them used to be dirt and there are pictures of those and to see the boulevard to something or other.
And it's a mud path. It is now not, but it was then.
And so it's really getting a city of cities here.
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.
Into it because it is a narrative. It's something where three things cause other things.
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.
Okay. So as a reader,
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.
But I think one of the things that's really emerging in this conference is actually the
centrality of place to almost everything that we think we are and that we think we do.
So I suppose my next question is going to be how we turn that sense of place,
those cobblestones under our feet and our awareness that where there was once sacré-coeur that was something else into meaning that I mean,
obviously billions of people traipse through mammoths every year and climb up the top of the sacré-coeur to see the view,
something I've always found very difficult to understand, partly because I hate heights, but there's something that I hate.
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.
I'm interested by writing. It's almost as panorama substitutes for the kind of historical thinking that I can hear in
your engagement with the Maine dialect and its potential Evanescence and disappearance,
or the mud that used to be on the pavements.
I mean, I suppose my question is, obviously everyone here thinks about the past all the time,
but it's interesting that Paris in particular seems to be swamped by people who don't want to think about it,
to want it never to change and never to have changed before.
Why are you different? I don't know.
I seem to have been born that way, but I also think that I am very aware,
which is another way of saying I was born, that way of why things are the way they are and I was a child.
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?
And when you see those connections, if you've got the kind of mind that wonders on connections,
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.
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.
And on top of that, I was really reminded in both of the papers that came before that death and cemeteries I've
been in a lot of cemeteries recently are a way of honouring the dead or memorialising,
the dead of bringing the dead into our lives so that they are not forgotten.
And one of the major things that happened during the commune was that people were shot down
in the street and frequently they would be thrown into a hole that a cannonball had made.
They were buried in courtyards, they were buried in mud streets.
They were tossed into group graves. They needed to be forgotten.
The government needed it to forget them. And they always said, Oh, you know, we killed a few people.
And it was terrible.
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,
that the real number of the working class that were executed at the end of the commune was closer to 40,000,
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?
Well, we shot them all. That was a real fire slapper in 1872.
So that kind of almost ritual desecration of the dead and rubbing them out and saying they did
not exist makes sacré-coeur not only one of the ugliest things I have ever seen in my life,
but also one of the most morally ugly things I have seen in my life.
And it was in Whitechapel. You're saying it's a white and sepulchre, aren't you?
I mean, you know, I almost never look at it the same way again.
And I hope others feel the same. That one of the reasons that when you're a writer and you're a novelist,
one of the things you can do is say this is this was here is what it could mean.
This is what it seems to have meant. And people don't know that.
I mean, it's not even knowing the facts of history is one thing.
Making them come alive in a way that make people think about the present while they're looking at the past is another.
And I think that that's something that fiction can do emotionally as well as intellectually.
I think one of the lovely things about this event is how willing everyone in academia is then to learn
from creative practitioners about how best to conduct the work of imagination that actually we all do.
I mean, I wouldn't be willing to make a very sharp distinction between what historians do, what archaeologists do, and what novelists do.
In fact, Martin Carver said, in my presence, once archaeologists dig things up and then they make up stories about them,
which sounds like a pretty accurate description of what your process is as well.
It's hard to you. And also it's fun.
It's fun to put your mind in a place and in a time and in a person that you are not.
I believe in writing what you want to know about. I guess my further question, though, which might make this a bit darker.
Is just turning to some of the questions that arose yesterday.
And fair enough. You were being one of the wise women of Glasgow, so going to cheerfully summarise the bit that I made.
We're all talking about, I suppose, under some general heading of colonialism and ideas about ownership and ideas
about the right to tell stories and ideas about the power to tell stories.
Right.
One of the things that struck me partly because I read I've been recently reading some early American descriptions by obvious colonising figures,
is that one of the huge attractions of Harriet's description of Virginia,
for example, is actually not at all dissimilar to what you're describing about men.
It's the attraction that we naturally feel for somebody who is themselves the stranger in the world,
trying from blindly but curiously to understand that world.
And I mean, Harriet wasn't straightforwardly bigoted or even straightforwardly conquistador.
She made the first Algonquin Grammar, though she made it for slightly colonialist purposes.
So I guess I'm wondering what scruples might afflict us all in terms of that sense of necessary estrangement,
all the things that we have to have a kind of birthright to.
Well, we have the birthright to being human. But my feeling is really that if you acknowledge.
Everything I have written has included someone who is coming into a situation that they're not familiar with.
So even though the hero that I have, the evil wisdom, Smallbone is a mainer,
he's from a different part of Maine, and he comes from a very different background.
And although he himself is not really, I made him up completely.
And his situation is one that I have learned about from friends who have come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
But you do your homework, you do your best.
You try to approach what you're doing, not as the wonderful and exotic, but as the absolutely real,
and that you've got a responsibility to make it as real as you can and not just say, this is the truth.
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.
It's like when people say, what do Americans think? Well, I don't know.
I know what a white, middle class woman of considerable privilege and education thinks.
But I can't speak for. But I can put myself not in that position.
The more I try to imagine myself as somebody who I am not, I think the more I understand everybody's humanity.
And as long as I don't act, I don't make them a point of view character.
And I do my best not to objectify them, but to make them part of the world that my characters are moving around in.
That's the due diligence I can do, and that is an imaginative thing.
Only writing about oneself, I think, is extremely limiting and not respectful of the rest of the world.
Also, I think that we need to maybe write or something and we just need to allow more voices in as well.
And people age out. People don't always write books. People get sick.
There are many reasons not to be writing a book, but it doesn't have to be an economy of scarcity.
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.
Lovely. And this is a perfect way in to the question that John MATTHEWS has asked through Caitlin MATTHEWS,
which is what is it about Fairey this enthrals you?
Because it makes such a beautiful metaphor and because people through history have used it,
whatever they believed was true or not, it remains emotionally true, whether it is physically true or not.
And the things that one hopes for and one tries to make come about it in anything you can.
Even without magic, you can try to make someone love you by owning them and stalking them and doing all of these things.
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.
I think psychologically realistic is great.
So that's a wonderful defensive theory because what you're actually saying is relatively close,
I think, to what J.R.R. Tolkien says about why we need it.
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.
Well, yeah, that, that there are parts of ourselves perhaps that we wish weren't there,
that we would like to go away, that we would like to pretend don't exist.
And perhaps it's the job of the truth of writing.
Not to shy away from those darkness is just in the interests of giving everyone a good time.
But perhaps we can also only have a good time by knowing that those darkness is all with us.
Always. Yeah. Perhaps I'll enjoy Sacré-coeur more and think of it as less of a big meringue.
No, I'm increasingly starting to see it through your eyes.
It's a poisoned meringue. What is it?
Meringue. And which is in itself absolutely wonderful.
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.
Is it necessary for you physically to go to Myanmar for she see the moment that no longer exists?
I like to travel. Well, yeah.
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.
I've written about Louisiana because my my mother came from there and I have kin.
I spent part of my childhood there. And we get back there from time to time because I just I like Louisiana.
I don't like their politics, but I, I find the Cajun culture and the rest of it.
I've written a couple stories about it. I've written a novel. So they are places that I feel a real connection to.
The only place that I've never been to that I wrote about was a short story called The Maid on the Shore.
I said it in Nova Scotia, and I've never been to Nova Scotia, but it took place in ballad land, right?
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.
And so there you go. That's kind of getting a sense of the distances and places is what was very important
to me about my mantra is how long would it take to walk from place to place?
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.
And you think, wait a minute, how could that possibly be?
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.
We tend to think of it as only facing in one direction, but it faces into it's it's a hill.
It's not a city. Understood. So you're drawing attention to the actually the limits of our imagination in turning a map
into something like a lived experience and a sense of the possible and the surprising.
Yeah, fantastic. Personally I'm rubbish with maps, so that might be just me.
But yeah. Well, I think we can thank Julia from here.
And we also have with us Maria Hadley, whose work has already been referenced twice at this conference.
Maria is probably best known for her novel, The Midwife.
Marvellous, unsettling, disturbing, thrilling, all those things.
And increasingly, I think it's going to be known for her translation of Beowulf.
And she's going to talk to us today about her work at moment, which is amazingly turning veneered into a musical.
Maria, are you sure? Yes, you are here.
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.
Magic. Humans have always lingered in the dark, whispering to ourselves, trying to find the right magic words to bring the light.
We regularly make magic out of scraps and broadcast our certainty to our communities, our readers,
our listeners, passing our cartography of the sacred and splendid on to future generations.
At this very moment, in these zoom windows were sitting in wait.
Had they existed a thousand years ago, would assuredly have been magical places akin to grottoes in Cuba,
from which civil spat, prophecy, poetry and politics to those who have been passed.
Does the prosaic nature of virtual conferencing make these windows any less magical?
Not as far as I'm concerned. Magic is a made thing put into the world with the combination of agenda and serendipity.
And poets have always taken advantage of their capacity to create magic with mere words, myself included, words in one other ingredient.
Before I get to that ingredient, though, a story. Back in 2019, I had a three month old baby and brain fog.
An editor at Audible called me one day and asked if I could do something with the Aeneid.
A full cast audio adaptation. 8 hours long, ten episodes.
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.
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.
But Dido, I figured, would be fun. So is that the right word?
Soon after I signed the contracts,
the pandemic hit and trapped in a tiny apartment on the California coast with an infant now allowed to walk on the beach.
I discovered to my dismay that the only thing my brain knew to do with the Aeneid was to make it into a musical.
So for too long pandemic years, I worked on an eight hour musical and yet done Man of La mancha style,
the epic poem mixed with a story about the difficulties of being a writer working for an emperor in the first century B.C.,
a poet with writer's block trying to write an epic just like me, with songs about the gods.
Lots of them. In May of 2022, exhausted and very done was virtual.
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.
I opened the blinds to look out over Dallas, Texas, and discovered the words for Jess Fortuna.
A devout page hid in huge letters on the roof of the poolhouse below me.
Fortune favours The Bold is the most quoted line from the Iliad.
Although this version happened bizarrely to be the last words of Pliny the
Elder as he approached his death from volcanic fumes on the beach at Pompeii.
The line has proven useful over the centuries.
Whenever people needed some magic words to conjure up the notion of a God driven who can't help it, [INAUDIBLE] the consequences.
Quest.
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.
Surely, though, the purpose was to make hotel guests feel as though they themselves were on a high stakes, spectacular adventure.
And I felt it. I stood at the window, transformed into the heroine of an epic and also complicated, transformed into Pliny,
growing toward his demise, taken to the classical world by three words, words of magic,
a proverb on the poolhouse Roof transformed the hotel into an epic location filled with ferocious warriors,
jealous deities, monsters and a bit of black magic often benefits from a bit of a dead language rung into the cauldron.
If magic weren't difficult, if magic didn't require skills, everyone would be doing it.
Throwing in some abracadabra grounds the magic in the same way a geological location can.
It has the added benefit of making the reader feel smart enough to be a sorcerer.
All of this brings me to the other part of magic created by writers location.
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.
Even if that destination is imaginary, you can use the magic of mention to ground your spell.
The magic of mention is all over both classical and contemporary literature,
one name causing the entirety of history to bobbed to the surface for a moment before disappearing again to allow the story to continue.
It enables a writer to load a sentence with multiple versions of a story to claim and
utilise various storytelling lineages without being forced to delve deeply into there.
The mention of a clear location can be invested in imagined wonder with history and yield a wonder that seems real in fantastical fiction,
whether epic poetry or contemporary novels,
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.
To give a more recent storytelling example and what relevant to the story one
based in the Dallas location I found myself in as I worked on this paper,
mentioned the words grassy knoll, for example, and instantly acquire a subtext of mystery, conspiracy, disappearance, and an event that,
through conflicting narratives, yielded ongoing chaos about which version of history would persevere.
The cast of characters appears with those two words JFK, Marilyn Monroe and that skin tight, crystal bedecked dress.
Singing Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Jackie in a pink Chanel suit spattered with blood and of course, Arthurian myths overlaying the whole thing.
A fence and shadows behind it. A sorceress, puff of smoke, American catastrophe and American magic.
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,
mention of which an unremarkable island is instantly imbued with sex, seduction, coercion and transformation.
Mention a monster and a hillside is hollowed. Now a quest point and a battle to be fought.
And one mentioned Hades and a sulphurous lake becomes a portal to the underworld,
mentioned Kuma, in every whisper in the region, becomes prophecy, every rumour, trust.
Virgil mentioned all of these things in a poem, otherwise stuffed full of lineage in famously slow sections,
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.
Despite being a recently commissioned work for Augustus's use in convincing
the population that he'd been named by the gods as the best driller of Rome,
as it was trained to turn Virgil's Aeneid into something palatable and intriguing for modern audio drama listeners,
I decided to utilise the accrued magic of places in the same way Virgil had.
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,
fleeing the emperor, whose commissioned his poem and landing at Cooma himself, seeking to enter Hades and find his possibly dead lover.
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.
There were symbols still offered scripted prophecies. For her case, I depicted Clay as a Vegas equivalent.
There's a song in the musical called What Happens in Cuba but Vegas with real magic beneath it.
Virgil descends to Hades to seek his beloved, finds a symbol, and uses her as a guide through the history of poetry and propaganda.
I use the same technique to press the history of August in Rome into my adaptation of the poem,
expanding Virgil's references and one line mentions of places loaded with intrigue into scenes,
referencing our own understanding of magical places of the modern world and into scenes referencing the ways that Virgil's poem
written as imperial propaganda and travelled through centuries to influence the ways our own contemporary societies were built.
In The Aeneid, Virgil uses the magic of Menschen in a distinctly cartographic fashion,
bringing Cyrus's magic into the story without ever landing on her island.
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
Aeneas journey toward the rocks of Rome's future edge into something filled with magic.
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
Virgil referenced magical moments from Homer without actually dramatising them.
First, a section of book seven of The Aeneid as a message ships approaches in translation by Sarah Ruden.
And then the same section of the poem adapted by me into an analysis of the
writing of the CRC referenced by Virgil and his unofficial apprentice patient.
So here is a little scrap of the Aeneid book seven.
This is Sarah Rubin's really awesome translation.
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.
So this is how we get all of the magic of Circe without having her in the action of the story.
Aeneas is old nurse you as well cared to in dying gave our shores your lasting bay.
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.
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.
The gleaming surface trembled. They sailed close by the shore of Cyrus's country.
The sun's rich daughter makes secluded groves there resound with constant singing.
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.
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.
Those hulking ships, once human, potent herbs from that fierce goddess, gave them the faces of the fur of beasts,
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.
And they escaped beyond the foaming shallows. The sea blushed with aethereal beams.
Aurora showed tiny in her rosy chariot the way the debated.
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,
kind of how this was written, how this section came to be in the poem that we know,
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.
SFX Outside the window, the sound of the ship moving down the coastline, away from kumite towards us.
Diaz, Virgil and so to work. Virgil The wind propelled the Trojan ships out of the dim shade of Hades toward.
SFX Cilicia reads over his shoulder. A soundscape comes into being Cyrus's island, a woman singing beautifully wordlessly.
So Portia passed the shores of Searcy, who'd been daughter to the sun on board.
The sailors listened to her, singing through the Cedar Forest, calling them to come to interrupt her,
leaving Steve her body to breathe her scented herbs, taste her wine.
Why are you name checking sexy but not making her a character for a job?
I'd stop a minute with Sersi. Virgil Augustus is scared of witches.
So horses a goddess. But fine. Fine.
She scribbles. The soundscape returns now with roaring lions, bears, boars, howling wolves singing wordlessly.
Her voice twining around. So Persia.
Perhaps the Trojan ship might have changed its destination, but there were lions there, and the sailors could hear them growling.
Bears, boars and wolves. All of those creatures once men now chained and penned by Sersi,
avenging herself on a world in which she was seen as a witch, rich with suitors and cruel to them, too.
No man should land there, they knew. And so they continued understanding their own frailties, skipping that bit of the mist.
What do you think of that, Virgil? Virgil continues to scribble at top speed.
So, Pasha, what are you working on, Virgil? I'm revising the entire poem to reflect the things I learned in Hades.
So, peace words. No editor likes to hear. So that is how I wrangle.
The way that Virgil grabs the history of classical mythology, yanks it from the Homeric verse, from the Odyssey,
and pulls it into his Aeneid in order to help his Aeneid feel more grounded in, weirdly, both magic and reality.
And I decided to also ground my version of the city with my own sort of adaptation and
wiggling around the Latin of Virgil and the ideas that we have about sushi ourselves.
From a thousand years of thinking about these bits of the Odyssey.
How I decided to imagine why he would only just use a little bit of sexy,
why he would only just sort of grab it and assault his Aeneid with the kind of
glorious sections from the Odyssey that he chooses not to dramatise or use.
The magical figures of the past remain magical, even if they have over time resolved into mortals.
In the Aeneid, Virgil mentions Helensvale brought along from Troy as a potential marriage gift.
While reading it, we instantly visualise Helen and the entire Trojan War, despite the poem's beginnings.
After the war is over.
Speaking of relics and relatedly, again, to Dallas and to this whole story of the way that magic travels through time and space,
alongside the words of poets, alongside relics, alongside people's longing for magic to exist.
I mean, there's always the question of is magic less potent in the modern world than it has always been?
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.
And we don't just we just don't always call it magic.
But here's a little piece of someone this year in 2022, doing some transformation magic, using a scrap of this mythic past.
Back to the locational magic of the words grassy knoll as well, because it's related.
Kim Kardashian in 2022 wrapped a story in the form of a dress.
The dress worn by Marilyn Monroe to sing Happy Birthday to JFK.
That dress we talked about a moment ago around her own body in an act of transformative magic,
she garbed herself in a ghost in order to acquire that ghost's lingering status.
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].
Wrong, wrong, horrible that she wore this magical piece of clothing that she's not allowed to wear, because apparently she's not magical.
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
she sang Happy Birthday to the president and showed herself as a kind of self objectified icon,
like that fragile dress that she wore or like that durable sentence.
Fortune favours the bold,
the smallest relic or sentence can be a magician's trick to create the illusion of depths where no depth has actually been written.
It can create palpable magic, even in scenarios where all that's in front of us is a hotel, swimming pool,
or a few lines about a woman on an island in the distance and just the sound of the animals around her.
In this conference. We've been considering Magic's relationship to actual place.
But as a writer, I find that I'm especially interested in creative place and in the ways that writers have over
the years been able to create certainty simply by using the correct combinations of words.
A few words can bring us from out of these doomed carols. Tacoma, Imperial, Rome, CFC Silent.
It can cause a crowd to travel through time, believing the unbelievable finding themselves at home in strange places, experiencing strange wonders.
Homer arrives in the near through the language of Virgil,
who references Helen of Troy and Sarah by dropping them onto the map as his story just put printing them on there.
I picked them up and brought them into a piece of drama, which will no doubt accompany commuters into their lives through headphones.
Gods, goddesses and poets discussing the fates and singing songs about centaurs while also and Cyclops and all kinds of other monsters,
while also hopefully making points about the perils of being a propagandist in the year 2022.
Old magic mixed with new magic located on no true landscape with the landscape and story.
Stories. Magic in the end is that it is portable place and that it can travel among populations being
revised and reworked for centuries according to the needs of the people experiencing it.
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.
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.
The beginning of an epic poem about Sappho written by soul Portia young, queer, Roman poet, not invented by me.
She's a real person.
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.
Over the course of ten episodes. So Persia finds her own voice and makes some magic of her own,
using all the tools used in Virgil to write an epic poem about a heroine instead of a hero,
which is a poem that I completely made up out of the old magical ingredients that Virgil is using.
And out of Virgil. And out of the poems of Jessel.
I sing of a woman's arms ropes in rigging a sailor questing her journey left in the keeping of the sea.
Bring her to me, Aphrodite. Let this humble poet tell another poet's history.
Let her cling to the rocks beneath left cut cliffs. Let her change her mind about death.
Let this changing change the world. Let the nine muses call out to their tents.
Let her ship carry them as crew. Let the harpies crawl from caves.
Let them take to her mast as perch. Let the sirens sing from their rocks.
Let her sing her own song back to them. I sing of Sappho brought back from the brink.
A woman who sank and surfaced again, spat from the sea by Scylla, longing for a lyric of her own.
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.
I sing of her adventures at sea, navigating tides to find desperate messages in the sand,
taking broken brides from their bedrooms, bringing them aboard.
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.
I sing of her seeking a new north, a new south, a new west, a new east.
I sing it wonders rot by leaving home. Thank you very much for that expansive voyage of the imagination.
Welcome to the final lecture of the magic and the sense of Place Conference,
which is going to be given by the wonderful and in every good way, magical.
Nancy Castella I'm especially grateful to Nancy because she's bravely coming
to us from the other side of the world and is nevertheless kindly joining us.
So I'm going to ask her to start her talk with warm thanks.
Thank you so much, Diane, for that generous introduction and for putting together such a wonderful program for everyone.
So in designing this presentation, I've taken the opportunity to be somewhat more playful than I usually am with remarks at conferences.
Usually I stick very closely to my historical sources.
But recently, while learning a little bit about analyses of folk horror in modern cinema,
I was really struck by the strong parallels between the kinds of cultural tensions that are central to this
subgenre of film and those embedded in a series of medieval ghost stories from around the turn of the millennium,
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,
and then I'll turn to my medieval folk horror stories centring upon ghosts or revenants.
My remarks on the latter will unfold as a series of analyses centring upon a series of confrontations,
contestations or juxtapositions that I find fruitful for my own purposes and for our theme of magic and place.
Those juxtapositions between the living and the dead, between paganism and Christianity, between colonisation and indigenous rebellion.
Past and present. And different forms of worship.
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.
The genre of folk horror, in brief, relies usually upon a trope of an uncanny place,
nearly always rural, haunted by the trace energies of ancient beliefs and violent acts.
It's actually a fairly diverse genre of cinema, but for my purposes, the most interesting motif involves an outsider,
someone unaware of the power of these past residues that are embodied in the particular place they're visiting.
This outsider arrives in a picturesque rural community and encounters uncanny forces and ancient traditions that they do not understand,
and of which they are often initially sceptical. The ancient past that lives on in rural isolation in these films very frequently is
configured as pagan folk horror explored the essential strangeness of the past.
Presented in caricature, though a caricature, I hasten to add, that does contain a germ of historical truth pagan Europe,
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.
Its capricious gods are worshipped with brutal and irrational rituals and nature, and the landscape are vaguely threatening,
unpredictable presences filled with primal energies just waiting to be unleashed.
The confrontation between the modern protagonist and the sort of zombie culture that they visit, which has somehow persisted into the present,
is a means of infecting a horror tale for the modern viewer that limbs the border between the familiar and the foreign.
I'll name only two widely known titles. A true classic of the genre is 1973 The Wicker Man,
in which a policeman arrives on a remote island summer isle in order to investigate the purported disappearance of a young girl,
only to realise, to his horror that all the inhabitants are devout pagans.
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.
The more recent American film Midsommar from 2019 uses a somewhat similar conceit.
A group of outsiders are lured to a pagan community in Sweden, only for most of them to meet a savage end,
with the exception of the female protagonist who ends up going native, so to speak,
as the honoured may queen who presides over some of these macabre events.
Significantly, both films end with a scene of pagan ritual, a birth sacrifice.
And I'm going to show just about a slightly longer than one minute clip of the ending of The Wicker Man.
Probably many of you have seen it,
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.
So. Some say.
She? Oh.
Oh. Okay.
So that's our ending to this really quite wonderful classic folk horror film.
And it's really highlighting this confrontation between the sacrifices, Christian faith and again,
this cheery group of pagans who are emulating him in order to procure a good harvest.
Now, I am not a film historian or critic by any stretch of the imagination,
but some of the ideas that have been floated to analyse folk horror strike me as quite fruitful
for understanding some uncanny stories from my own field of medieval history as well.
So I believe these two types of storytelling enter into an interesting dialogue.
There are three analytic ideas I want to introduce which all build upon one another.
The first two derive from a series of lectures delivered by Shocked Derrida at the University of California Riverside in 1993.
Francis Fukuyama had recently declared the end of history and the final triumph of liberal democracy for all time.
Clearly not a prediction that has come true very well.
Gary Dodds lectures at the time respond to this, suggesting that reports of the death of Marxism and of communism were belied by persistent
spectres of Marx that continued to haunt contemporary debates and political understandings.
Some of their ideas, language and ideas have since been lifted entirely out of this original context and applied
to the radically different world of folk horror where they tend to work quite well.
The first notion I want to highlight derives from a series of reflections Derrida makes upon
the impossibility of the present rupturing free from the past from which it has sprung.
The past continually intrudes into the present,
a slippage that Dairy Don capitulates with the notion that time is perennially moving out of joint or off its hinges.
In short, the past haunts the present like a ghost whose traces are evidence, even when its materiality is gone.
Time unhinged is itself from its presumed linear unfurling.
In order to circle back to oscillate between moments of now and before, the present itself is a sort of double vision.
The persistence of a culture of presumed long dead in a rural pocket, seldom seen by outsiders,
becomes the basis for this sort of unhinged time in folk horror cinema.
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.
A ontology seeks out the effectivity and presence, as he phrases it,
of the spectral of the inherited past and its unseen structure ation of the present moment.
A ontology traces the obscured and deliberately occult and residue of the past ghosts,
thus making visible, as it were, their power to condition our present forms of existence.
Moreover, ontology, according to Derrida, quote, harbours within itself eschatology and teleology.
That is to say, a haunt, a logical approach compresses all of time,
rooting the present in the persistence of past spectres and seeing the future
spring in turn from our past dependent present within the realm of folk horror,
we see this collision of temporality quite clearly,
the present conjured from a ontology of a fragmented past and often gesturing towards an apocalyptic outcome.
This is a central tension in the genre.
Finally, Derry Dodd's reflections have also been paired with a word popularised by the 1950s Situationist guy de Boer, that of Psychogeography.
As with Derrida's ideas, this coinage has been adapted quite a bit in intervening decades.
For my purposes, Psychogeography references the ways in which emotional charges and psychic residues are
perceived as embedded within the material culture of a place in the world of folk horror,
violence,
ritual superstition and pagan belief leave traces sometimes invisibly but always nonetheless discernibly in the make up of the physical world itself.
This includes both elements of the natural landscape as well as human structures.
These trace energies may be barely perceptible at a conscious level, but they exert force.
They affect the psyche of inhabitants and visitors alike, exerting a kind of unseen magnetism upon thoughts and behaviours to navigate.
The psycho geographical world of folk horror is constantly to sense subtle traces of ancient savagery and hauntings made present
by time out of joint uncanny indicators that modernity is deeply compromised by the haunting weight of an ever present past.
The layering of these ideas adds up, I believe,
to something like a theory of magic and place time that continually expands and contracts, folding it upon itself like a pleated garment.
Spectral presence is from the past,
but quietly enchanted the present place places imbued with invisible energies and emotional residues that exert a pull upon the visible world.
But magical or not, it is, in fact, the precision and specificity of these ideas that makes them useful.
When applied to my medieval ghost stories.
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.
Pete Mars, Ghost or Revenant Stories are one of the richest and most fascinating collections of Mccolm tales in any medieval text.
His work provides an excellent window onto the issues of how the newly imported
religion of Christianity was interacting with older afterlife beliefs in his region.
Like the folk horror films of the modern screen, The Hauntings and Deep Mars tale involve, quote unquote,
modern protagonists visiting places of ancient power that preserve the traces of an uncanny pagan
culture and its rituals that were associated very deeply with episodes of past violence and slaughter.
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,
a fear that the veneer of the modern and enlightened present might be overtaken by the
dangerous traces of a superstitious past that literally in here is in the landscape itself.
Of course, paganism was also a far more recent spectre in Mars time.
Indeed, not quite a spectre at all, but a still living religion,
albeit one that had been losing ground to the encroachments of Christian hegemony for some time.
Theodore Mars served as a bishop in a place the far eastern frontier of Christendom, at the edge of pagan Slav communities,
and a time the ten teens in which the Christian church still was actively evangelising a mixed population.
So I have a couple of maps here that I'm just going to pause to introduce.
First one is showing you in the sort of purple blue area,
the central core of power of the are Tony and emperors who are the people that Itamar is serving.
And then this sort of striped area that I've just circled is the area that they're
trying to expand into and christianise and politically control this region.
But it's still highly contested. And then our next map is a sort of close up of that same region.
And I'm going to circle here a couple of different towns that are going to be mentioned in my presentation.
Mirza Burg to the south, which is circled in a slightly lighter colour, is the origin of our informant.
Eat more of mirzapur. He spent some time in Magdeburg and I'm going to refer to that.
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.
And I have to have a map, right? So in this region, Christianity was young.
Yet the world beat Ma believed was growing old.
The Imperial Dynasty that beat more served following in the footsteps of all the previous generations of his family,
consciously perceived itself as fulfilling an important apocalyptic role.
These rulers, known as the Ottomans, ruling around the turn of the millennium,
consciously modelled themselves in accordance with a seventh century prophecy known as the Last World Emperor.
The text of this prophecy foretold the rise of a righteous Christian emperor in the last days of the world.
This warrior for God would defeat paganism and extend the faith to the limits of the known world,
thus symbolically overcoming the forces of apocalyptic evil described in the Book of Revelation.
Once world conquered a peace had been achieved. According to this prophecy,
this last world emperor would travel to Jerusalem in order to greet Jesus at the
time of his second coming as he descended from the heavens to the Mount of Olives.
The last world emperor would then personally hand over to Lord Jesus His Crown and surrender to Him dominion over an entirely christianised earth.
The Crown was designed both to display their earthly glory as emperors and also
kind of hilariously to be a fitting gift for the Lord Jesus in this scenario.
So this is literally the crown that the atoning emperors hoped to give Jesus on the Mount of Olives.
To return to our specific context. They are, Tony.
An expansion across the Elk River and subsequent attempt at subduing Slavic paganism was regarded as a struggle with apocalyptic dimensions.
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,
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.
The town obviously then had been attacked without warning by a force of pagan rebels against Etonian hegemony,
and most of the population were brutally slaughtered.
Ball 11 was one of a series of fortified towns across the Elk River, protecting the Northeastern marches of the expanding autonomy and realm.
Thus, German power structures were being established in lands that were pagan, in religion and Slavic and ethnicity and culture.
The mass killing at Val Slavin was an act of revolt by pagan Slavic forces resisting this colonisation and acculturation.
And as we know, all good. Those stories must spring from an act of violence.
In deep Mars story, a living priest is assigned to the parish of all Slavin,
and there encounters a congregation of ghosts occupying the church at night.
He is terrified when he sees them, but approaches the building nonetheless.
Then he is accosted by one of them, a woman whom he had known in life.
She predicts his coming death, and he does indeed perish soon thereafter.
So far, so creepy. The implication is that the violent history of massacre of Christians in this region,
combined with the fact that the church had once become consecrated, have given a toehold to the dead to persist in haunting it.
The psycho geographical residue of pagan Christian violence,
combined with the vulnerability of the sacred building to haunting incursions by the dead, seem like classic folk horror themes medieval style.
The dead, though ostensibly peaceful in this story, project a nonetheless a definite aura of menace and terror.
This motif was repeated with important variations in a series of other narratives presented in Deep Mars Chronicle.
He continues, for example, by sharing a story of the dead glimpsed from afar, conducting a mass at night in a church in Magdeburg.
There follows another account of his own rather disappointing personal experience of the dead.
He once heard grunting noises coming from a cemetery.
Eventually, however, Pete Ma builds to his grand conclusion a horror story that had been shared with him by his niece, a Christian abbess.
This tale is similar in many ways to the vastly been one, but quite stunning in one divergence that renders its interpretation entirely different.
Once again, we have a town that had previously been the scene of a pagan rebellion, destruction and mass slaughter,
a place involving a once deep, consecrated church inhabited by the animate dead, and a priest who meets an untimely end.
All these elements are presented even more intensely, however, in this new story.
It's set in the town of Devon Tura much farther west. The tale was roughly contemporary to that in Wealth Slave.
It can be dated also to the 10th century because of a bishop who was mentioned by name.
Let's begin with the fact that this was yet another place haunted by a bloody history of pagan resistance to Christian hegemony,
one that left behind a significantly freighted memory of violence, slaughter and brutal retribution.
Devon tours like Boss Lehmann once had been devastated by Pagan forces rebelling
against the expansion of the Christian religion and its political backers.
Our backstory, however, begins earlier in the seven seventies, soon after,
the Emperor Charlemagne claimed Suzerainty over this region of Western Saxony
in a bid to expand his political influence as well as the Christian religion.
So this is a much earlier generation and a different imperial dynasty,
engaging in very similar processes of expanding political and Christian hegemony into a pagan region.
These two goals work together, of course. Religious acculturation was understood as a means of undermining indigenous solidarity and resistance,
while acceptance of Christianity would make the overlordship of Frankish neighbours more palatable.
However, in 772, the Christian settlement that Charlemagne had established in Devon Tower was attacked in a bloody pagan revolt.
The local church was destroyed, and the families of Frankish aristocrats,
whom Charlemagne had settled as loyal Christian colonists, administrators and missionaries in this area were slaughtered en masse.
In retaliation.
Charlemagne in thief Mars time, a much revered figure already Charlemagne declared all out war on the recalcitrant pagan Saxons of this region.
That year or possibly the next.
He destroyed an important airman soul that is a living sacred pagan tree or possibly an upright pole symbolising such a tree.
But this is a very important pagan cult object, as Charlemagne's wars against the rebelling pagan forces continued successfully.
He eventually demanded in peace negotiations held in 782, that 4500 pagan rebels should be handed over to him for justice.
Charlemagne then had all of them beheaded on the same day, an event known as the Massacre of Verdun,
and one that even Christian chroniclers recounted with some ambivalence.
While medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when it comes to accurate counting,
it appears that the number of men killed was significant enough to make a strong impression upon contemporaries.
This background of violence and counter-violence inevitably informs the reader's psycho geographical
understanding of Deventer as a location for a confrontation between the living and dead pagans and Christians.
This time, I prefer to read my own translation of Ma's words, which he in turn attributes to his niece, Brigitte, his informant.
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.
This is a different story motif called the Grateful Dead,
in which a man who always prays for the Dead is protected by them when he's chased by some enemies into a churchyard.
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.
So again, to return to the original source, this is Mars, and he's talking to him.
During the 80 years or more when that great man Baldrick held the Holy See of Utrecht,
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.
He consecrated it and commended it to the care of one of his priests.
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.
And he heard them singing. The priest informed the bishop immediately.
The latter commanded him to sleep in the church.
But on the next night the priest was thrown out of the church by the dead folk, along with the bedding he lay upon.
Terrified, the priest again complained to his superior.
However, the bishop ordered that he should bless himself with the relics of saints and be dispersed with holy water,
but that on no account should he stop guarding the church.
The priest, obedient to his bishop's command, tried to sleep in the church again, but he was struck with terror.
And so lay wide awake and watchful. And lo and behold, at the accustomed hour, the dead arrived.
They picked him up. They placed him upon the altar and they incinerated his body with flames down to a fine ash.
As day is to the living. So night is conceded to the dead.
This tale of devoutly murderous revenants raises many more questions than the boss labelled one.
I find intimations here of three distinct models or layers for conceptualising how the dead and the living co-existed.
First, the explicit rationale Ft.
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.
This is a recurrent refrain in his account of these stories.
He introduces the section of Ghost Tales with this preface.
He then returns to the theme of resurrection again in the middle, citing some biblical passages.
And finally, he closes his whole series with an even more specific invocation of the population
group he believes needs to learn a lesson about Christian resurrection.
Quote, I speak to the unlearned and most especially to the slobs who believe that everything finishes with temporal death.
I am firmly indicating the certainty of our future resurrection and recompense according to merits.
Thus Demara as someone charged with pastoral responsibilities of the geographic limit of Christendom and at the temporal brink of the Eschaton,
finds these tales appealing for the purpose of teaching pagan Slavs about the resurrection for the Bishop.
The moving animate cadavers of these dead folk provide a pattern of possibility,
proof that the mortal coil may transcend corruption, rise and live again.
If there were local rumours going around about living corpses who gather together in community,
then perhaps it was only a small leap to persuade people in this region of the promise of resurrection.
Thus, in line with my theme of focus, our time here is once again off its hinges.
The past episodes of pagan Christian violence that give uncanny properties to these
particular places not only collapses into the present modernity of our hapless priest,
but also gestures towards the eschaton as the atoning kings prepare to conquer the world for Christianity.
These places of conflict seem to have resisted, almost in spite of themselves, the claiming of territory for Christian hegemony.
A haunting, logical reading foregrounds the persistence of the spectre of paganism in an ever more Christian world.
Yet the Mars proposition also is quite illogical.
The doctrine of general resurrection occupies a specific role within the unfolding of an apocalyptic,
universal history and the process of human salvation.
It hardly is proven by contemporary folk horror stories about the living dead.
Even if the Mark believed himself currently to be living in the end times.
His argument still is strikingly incoherent. Above all, however,
the gruesome murder of the priest by these dead folk obstructs any transparent
understanding of them as symbols for the most exalted mystery of the Christian faith.
In yet another collapse of time and place, these dead folk holding mass may look like pious Christians,
but in fact they act much more like the pagan dead.
Indeed, I would posit that the story itself is a hybrid formation that preserves,
at its core an old pagan idea about the dead forming complex communities in close parallel to the living.
A formulation that's hinted at with the closing lines of the story as day is to the living.
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.
The dead have a free hold on this once consecrated church during Night-Time hours
and resent the intrusion of the living man into their own place during their time.
Time thus is doubled. Other details are likewise revelatory.
For example, the fact that in both Pete Marr's tales about dead congregations, the deceased parishioners give offerings to their priest.
This presents an intriguing opening.
Offerings were small tokens given directly to clergy in addition to the tithe in order to support miscellaneous parish expenses.
Thus, the presence of offerings in these stories suggests that these dead people possessed material wealth,
which they in turn share with their dead clergymen. They must then have other occupations beyond the mass at which they are glimpsed
that involve possessions and wealth and other such aspects of daily existence.
Such glimmers of a fuller, post-mortem society put the life and afterlife.
These revenants had social differentiations, customs, private property and an economy of exchange.
I don't have time here to present some other texts for comparison,
but several medieval chroniclers do include elaborate discussions of such post-mortem existences.
My personal favourite does arrived in the same region as the more, albeit from a late later century.
It envisions a group of the dead inhabiting a mountain where they sell and reap in the fields,
find partners and marry, set up households together, and most intriguingly, give birth to children.
The dead in this vision have fully realised afterlives extending even to fecundity.
Their numbers are replenished not only by new deaths, but by giving birth to living dead infants.
Beyond questions about the life of the dead and their claims to place in time.
However deep. Maurice Devin ter revenants pose a question that is not inherent to his other ghost stories.
For these dead surely do not behave as good Christian dead ought to do.
Indeed, the rapidity with which they turn from prayer to slaughter is at first glance puzzling.
Unless, of course, worship and killing were the same thing for this congregation of cadavers.
How are we to understand the religious rites of these revenants?
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,
according to TMR, in a detail that only an omniscient narrator could relate for, there were no surviving witnesses of that night.
The community of the dead went to some trouble to kill the priest in a specific part of the church.
They did not set upon him as he lay upon his pallet, but picked him up bodily and transported him to the spot.
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.
In short, the revenants lay the priest upon the high place of sacrifice, and there immolated him flesh and bones until nothing remained.
Pete Mar's dead folk, in other words, enacted a traditionally pagan form of worship by making of the living priest a burden.
Offering a sacrificial victim reduced to nothingness and rendered as incense for the delectation of the ancestors and the gods.
Both human sacrifice and specifically burnt offerings have long been associated with Northern European paganism,
a custom that's attested in classical barbarian ethnography,
including Caesar's Gallic war, which is the origin of the custom inspiring the film The Wicker Man and in Charlemagne Saxon.
And in chroniclers such as Adam of Bremen, among many others.
First sacrifice was offered to gods, two ancestors or both for centuries, as.
As an expression of worship and solidarity beyond the grave.
Until Christianisation eliminated the practice piecemeal.
Indeed, more himself, a mere three paragraphs after concluding his horrifying story,
saw fit to explain this pagan custom of burnt sacrifice in some detail.
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.
They believed with certainty that these sacrifices would serve the dead below.
It is striking that so soon after describing dead folk, bringing a living man to an altar and incinerating his body to ash,
that deep marsh would offer this description of burnt offerings and human sacrifice as the distinctively pagan, sacral rite of the region.
The connections hardly can have been lost on him.
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.
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.
Indeed, these dead worshippers are portrayed more in keeping with pagan rather than Christian norms.
Thus, while the death of the priest in deep Mars first story from Baal Slavin is just passively foretold by the dead,
the Devon Tall tale involves a more active role for the dead in bringing about the priest's demise.
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.
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.
The congruence is or plain, and I already have laid for some thoughts as I've gone along.
What I'd like to do instead is pose a challenge to historians,
and I include myself here who deal with sources in the general idiom that deals with horror and the uncanny.
We have a tendency to take our sources quite seriously to see them primarily as insights into religion and conversion,
culture and colonialism, states and so forth. And certainly these are reasonable ways to approach such material.
Yet I think the comparison with Modern Folk Horror unveils a dimension of these stories that we tend to overlook.
The emotional appeal of sheer, shivering pleasure.
Horror stories understood primarily as horrific, not as religion or as something else are not a new invention.
Nor is the interest in them due to a peculiarly modern sensibility.
Well, Pete Mars Revenants tell us about serious historical processes.
They also, I believe, speak to the perennial pleasures of the uncanny of frightful and unexpected encounters.
For many hearers of these tales in the 11th century as now,
their appeal lies in the delicious sense of having suddenly wandered into an alternative time and place where menace and magic collide.
Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you.
From all of us for engrossing us with so many chilling and wonderful stories that I thought connected.
Wonderfully with much that's been said and discussed in the course of this event.
Thank you all and continue to be as awesome as you've all been over the past three days.
Thank you. Over and out.