The Baxandall Visiting Fellow Lecture: 'The Jury, the Witch, and the Shadow of Doubt: Witchcraft on Trial in Early Modern England'

Tue 18 March

Robinson College, the Umney Theatre

The fourth Baxandall Visiting Fellow lecture will be delivered by Krista J. Kesselring is Professor of History at Dalhousie University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has previously published works on early modern English law, crime, and politics, with monographs on the royal pardon, the Northern Rebellion of 1569, and homicide. Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Tim Stretton, is Marriage, Separation and Divorce in England, 1500-1700 (2021). She has edited or co-edited several volumes of essays, including with Natalie Mears, Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and its Records (2021) and with Matthew Neufeld, Reckoning with History: Essays on Uses of the Past (2024). She is also a regular contributor to the collaborative academic blog, Legal History Miscellany. During her term as the Visiting Baxandall Fellow, she will continue to work on women’s and legal history, exploring how changing uses of records, precedents, and evidence impinged upon the pursuit of justice in both particular cases and in the abstract.

The lecture synopsis: Juries saved a high proportion of people accused of crimes related to witchcraft even at the height of the so-called 'witch hunting’ era in England’s history. Trial juries sent hundreds of women (and some men) to the gallows, true, but this talk focuses on the restraint and doubt shown not by learned, elite scholars or judges but by community members who acted as witnesses or jurors and helped free many hundreds more. Examining an unusually well documented set of accusations against two women in the 1580s – accusations that travelled from rural Buckinghamshire to Queen Elizabeth’s privy council at Westminster – this talk explores the trial process, the role of the jury, and the work done by stories of ‘common and vulgar’ superstition in our understanding of the history of witchcraft.

Cost: Free to attend