Walter Scott

Let's look back at the European history behind witch hunts, persecutions, and burnings with Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast.

Writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy thought of witches as romantic rebels, and I mean romantic in the post-Enlightenment romance era sense of the word, or they were outlaws, and both writers described solitary rural witches and cunning women in their novels.

French writer Jules Michelet, an anti-monarchist and anti-Catholic, produced many books of social reform in history.

He advocated a turn from Christianity to worshipping a great mother goddess and held that women were morally superior to men and that witch trials were an effort by the elite to subvert the rights of women and the working class.

I heard Audubon deliver there some interesting discourses on the habits of North American birds, sneering somewhat unjustly at Warranty.

by the way a negro lived in edinburgh who had travelled with waterton and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds which he did excellently he gave me lessons for payment and i used often to sit with him for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man Dr. Leonard Horner also took me once to a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, where I saw Sir Walter Scott in the chair as president, and he apologized to the meeting as not feeling fitted for such a position.

I looked at him and the whole scene with some awe and reverence, and I think it was owing to this visit during my youth, and to my having attended the Royal Medical Society, that I felt the honor of being elected a few years ago an honorary member in both these societies, more than any other similar honor.

If I had been told at the time that I should one day have been thus honored, I declare that I should have thought it as ridiculous and improbable as if I had been told that I should be elected King of England.

So how do we interact with our most valuable possession, the Bible?

As the novelist, historian and poet Sir Walter Scott lay dying, he turned to his great friend and son-in-law J.G. Lockhart, the man who was later to write his life story, and said, Will you read to me from the book? Lockhart wondered which of his many books he meant, for he knew he was a great writer, so he asked which book.

"'Which book?' replied Scott.

"'There is but one book.

He was cited as a wonderful shot with the rifle, since not only could he split a bullet on a knife blade, but he could divide it into two such equal parts that, upon weighing them, scarcely any difference would be perceptible.

Kennedy's countenance strikingly recalled that of Herbert Glendinning, as Sir Walter Scott depicted it in The Monastery.

His stature was above six feet, full of grace and easy movement.

He had seemed gifted with Herculean strength, a face embrowned by the sun, eyes keen and black, a natural air of daring courage.

Between 1749 and 1758 Addison made a reconnaissance of the river and visited Gorea.

From 1785 to 1788 Golbery and Geoffroy travelled across the deserts of Senegambia and ascended as far as the country of the Moors, who assassinated Saulnier, Bisson, Adam, Riley, Cochelet, and so many other unfortunate men.

Then came the illustrious Mungo Park, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, and like him a Scotchman by birth.

Sent out in 1795 by the African Society of London, he got as far as Bambara, saw the Niger, travelled 500 miles with a slave market, reconnoitred the Gambia River, and returned to England in 1797.