"The title of this book is a bit misleading --- it's actually a very sympathetic study of how accusations of witchcraft (fairly baseless, as far the modern eye can determine) became a useful tool for noble adversaries to strike at powerful but inconvenient royal women who would otherwise have been untouchable, How, after all, can you prove you're not a witch?"
Publisher Pegasus Books
Publication Date 2021-07-13
Section New Titles - Paperback / European History / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Alan H.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781643137704
The stories of four royal women, their lives intertwined by family and bound by persecution, unravel the history of witchcraft in fifteenth-century England.
Until the mass hysteria of the seventeenth century, accusations of witchcraft in England were rare. However, four royal women, related in family and in court ties—Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Elizabeth Woodville—were accused of practicing witchcraft in order to kill or influence the king.
Some of these women may have turned to the “dark arts” in order to divine the future or obtain healing potions, but the purpose of the accusations was purely political. Despite their status, these women were vulnerable because of their gender, as the men around them moved them like pawns for political gains.
In Royal Witches, Gemma Hollman explores the lives and the cases of these so-called witches, placing them in the historical context of fifteenth-century England, a setting rife with political upheaval and war. In a time when the line between science and magic was blurred, these trials offer a tantalizing insight into how malicious magic would be used and would later cause such mass hysteria in centuries to come.
