'A woman’s voice is a hex’: a creative and critical exploration of witchcraft literature

Abstract

The first part of the thesis, Fifteen Witches, is a historical novel about the witch trials in Newcastle. In August 1650, fourteen women and one man were hung for witchcraft on Newcastle’s Town Moor. The hangings were a result of witch trials, with similarities to those held elsewhere in the country during the Early Modern period. A witch pricker was brought from Scotland and paid to find women who were guilty of the crime of witchcraft and these women were executed for their perceived crimes. This novel is the first work of fiction to represent the story of one of those fourteen women: Katherine Coultor, based on the historical figure of the same name, is the narrator of Fifteen Witches, and we follow her as she struggles against the oncoming storm of the trials. To compose this work, I consulted many documents relating to these trials including Ralph Gardiner’s England's Grievance Discovered in Relation to the Coal Trade (1655) which recorded an account of the witch trials.
In the last fifteen years, contemporary novels about witchcraft have become increasingly popular; this has led to the rise of a new subgenre, ‘witchcraft literature’, which the accompanying literary-critical dissertation seeks to define and explore. Fifteen Witches makes a distinctive contribution to this emerging genre: it considers a different kind of trial to the ones in Pendle and East Anglia, which are more often written about. The witch trials in Newcastle are unique because of the urban space that they take place in, the peculiarities of the changing political and social landscape in Newcastle, and the historical neglect of literary depictions of this area. Place and regionality are both at the centre of Fifteen Witches. Much of the writing on Early Modern witch trials is focused on the female experience and my novel also focuses on female characters. However, while women have often been portrayed in media only as victims in these trials, it is important to note that women also made up the vast majority of accusers and witnesses. In my writing, I seek to represent the complicated legal power of the female voice when it is accusing others of witchcraft, as well as considering those victimised by accusations.
My novel is accompanied by a literary-critical dissertation, which considers ‘witchcraft literature’ as a sub-genre of historical fiction: it explores the way that female voice is represented through witchcraft narratives in contemporary historical and literary fiction. The focus is on five works of contemporary witchcraft literature written in the last fifteen years; Kirsty Logan’s Now She is Witch (2023), Jenni Fagan’s Hex (2022), A.K. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches (2021), Beth Underdown’s The Witchfinder’s Sister (2017) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012). I have chosen texts exclusively by female or non-binary writers that take different approaches to witchcraft. This selection was chosen in the hopes of assessing a synthesised example of how witchcraft is being used to explore the female experience in the wider subgenre. My research builds on the work of Diane Purkiss’ The Witch in History (1996) and Silvia Federici’s Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018) and Caliban and The Witch (2004), which provide feminist accounts of the relevance of witchcraft to contemporary discussions of gender.
In addition, demonological texts pertaining to witchcraft are utilised to demonstrate how contemporary novels engage with history. These are Early Modern texts that explore ideas of demonic belief either through theological debate and study or through individual reports of particular witch trials in a region (often written by the witchfinder themselves). the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) or Hammer of Witches by Jacob Sprenger and Henrich Kramer is one such text that is referenced to show Early Modern witchcraft belief.
This work demonstrates the wider traits of ‘witchcraft literature’ in historical and literary fiction and contextualises Fifteen Witches in terms of its contribution to the gen-re. It consists of four chapters: the first evaluates the role of reproduction in witchcraft narratives; the second focuses on the figure of the familiar; the third considers representations of supernatural power in these witchcraft texts; finally, I briefly consider the contribution that Fifteen Witches makes to the genre, arguing that it provides a very different example of witchcraft literature in exploring the unique urban space of 1600s Newcastle with a close focus on the history of these particular trials.