Witch-hunt

And we're here because Colchester Castle isn't just simply a nice castle and museum.

In 1645, it's where Matthew Hopkins, leading the witch hunts, held a number of women in for interrogation before trial for witchcraft.

And so we're here to read some selections from Silvia Federici's book, Caliban and the Witch, which doesn't specifically mention Colchester or mention Hopkins, but does talk about Essex and why there were so many witchcraft here, and she connects that to enclosures, to poverty, to accumulation, to destruction of collective life.

And so these bits are not the witches themselves, but people made into witches.

that the victims in Europe were mostly peasant women may account for the historian's past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.

There is no need, however, for such agnosticism, nor do we have to decide whether the witch hunters truly believed in the charges which they leveled against the victims, or cynically used them as instruments of social repression.

If we consider the historical context in which the witch hunts occurred, the gender and class of the accused, and the effects of the persecution, then we must conclude that witch-hunting in Europe was an attack on women's resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal.

Witch hunting was also instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women's bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources.

Yes.

This is the magic of the internet is that it can bring us together to talk about witch trials in the 1600s.

So I was hoping you could start by setting up this story for us because this is definitely something that I didn't know much about when I first started reading this time period and this place.

So if you could sort of set up this story and a little bit of how it came to you.

So when I was in my 20s at some point, I realized that I needed to know more historically what it meant to use the word witch.

And that led me down a sort of crazy hobby that I still do.

actually am inside, which was researching historical witch trials and the fates of people who have been accused of witchcraft.

And I started in Denmark because I'm from here and there's actually a train that runs out...

and that changed the geography of the project.

Occult history has often been told through Europe, Hermes, Pythagoras, the Grimoires, Kabbalah, Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, Dee, the Witch Trials, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Spiritualism.

Those histories matter, but they aren't the planet.

The chronology had to move through Mesopotamia and Egypt, South Asia and East Asia, Tibet and Southeast Asia.

Today's guest's debut novel, A Poisoner's Tale, reimagined the true story of a 17th century Italian poisoner and went on to win the Historical Writers Association Debut Crown Award.

Her latest novel, They Can't Burn Us All, takes readers to 17th century Iceland, where the country's notorious witch trials unfold in a way unlike anywhere else in Europe.

Catherine Kempf, welcome to In My Good Books.

Well, thank you so much, Susie.

So it's called They Can't Burn Us All and it'll be out by the time we're talking about this out there in the world.

And basically it's set in 17th century Iceland and it's a story that formed around a real life witch trial that took place in Kirkjubal, which is in the West Fjords, which back then was a really remote part of Iceland.

And obviously we had like the kind of Protestant reformation sweeping through Europe and America and bringing with it the kind of burning fires and the hangings and, you know, The whole femicide of the witch trials.

So obviously, as a rageous woman, I've been really interested in how they came about.

The last surviving reports I read, Eleanor.

Via Iceland are a witch burning that took place in 1407 and a wedding that took place in 1408.

Witch burning? 30 seconds.

Were they trying to hold off the cold? Is that why?

It has been suggested.

So when you get the witch trials later on, there's an economist called Emily Oslo who says, look, there are more witch burnings and the temperature is getting colder.

Are these two things connected? But what's fascinating, this witch is a man.

He's called Kolgrimer.

So this topic isn't quite, you know, a scary thing or anything like that, but it's kind of going there a little bit.

We're going to be kind of talking about some witch trials, in particular Switzerland, Scotland, Ireland's witch trials.

Obviously we touched very briefly on the Salem witch trials when we did

our coverage of the Fear Street trilogy.

So we've already kind of talked about that a little bit.

But obviously the Salem witch trials is one of the more

famous witch trials.

When you think witch trial, you think Salem.

Moving on for Year of the Schrader.

I watched his next movie, which was also a made-for-TV movie for HBO titled Witch Hunt from like 92, 93.

Wow.

Where it is Dennis Hopper as a private eye in L.A. in the 50s where magic is real and he is H. Philip Lovecraft.

angry feminism.

Yeah, so this is a piece that she performed on the Rebel Rouser stage called Witch Hunt.

Witch Hunt.

But this poem I wrote just after Me Too, so it's kind of inspired by that.

Nothing too wild in it, but if you need to look after yourself while you're listening to it, then please do.

Witch Hunt.

Watch out, weird sisters.

There's a new witch in town.