Marion Gibson

Join us for a fantastical evening in the Bookshop with Professor Marion Gibson to celebrate the publication of her latest book on witchcraft and witch-hunts. Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials explores the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, taking us in new and surprising directions.

Marion shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises. But Marion also tells the stories of the 'witches' whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and 'Witchfinder General' Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them.

Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history, the lines between witch and witch-hunter have been blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial.

Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, UK. She's been thinking about witches in history since she read her first account of a witch trial in a book lent to her on a dark, rainy afternoon in November 1991. She was so excited by the story that she forgot to give the book back. Thirty years on, she is the author of nine books on witches in history and literature.