The Witchfinders.

TV Sigh. Much as I enjoyed The Witchfinders, I can't quite summon up the imagination tonight to offer an opinion over eight paragraphs, so if you don't mind, I'll leave this for now and go and take care of myself. Think of me as Jacqueline Hill during the fourth and fifth episodes of The Sensorites. Perhaps I'll come back to it.  Just so that you haven't wasted a click, here's an excellent primer from BBC History about James I's obsession:

"James’s obsession with witchcraft can be traced back to his childhood. The violent death of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to have inspired a dark fascination with magic. His Highness told me her death was visible in Scotland before it did really happen,” related Sir John Harington many years later, being, as he said, “spoken of in secret by those whose power of sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air”."

A lecture about witchcraft in general from Professor Wrightson at Yale University:



And a fascinatingly anonymous three column website about the Pendle Witches:

"During the sixteenth century whole districts in some parts of Lancashire seemed contaminated with the presence of witches; men and beasts were supposed to languish under their charm, and the delusion which preyed alike on the learned and the vulgar did not allow any family to suppose that they were beyond the reach of the witch's power."

See you next week.