Details
Date: Saturday 26 April 2025, 16:30-17:30
Venue: Augustine House | AH3.31
Social History
Tickets: £10/person per event in person
Discount: for those buying 10 or more tickets in one transaction, then each ticket is £8/person per event in person. Student ticket (does not apply to the Archives, Hospital or Church), £2/person/per event with a max of 5% for any of the talks.
Dr Rebecca Warren
Rebecca Warren is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent, specialising in the religious history of the British Civil Wars and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. She is currently writing a monograph on ‘The Interregnum Church in England, c.1649-1662’. She is an historical consultant to the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon and has taught a range of early modern undergraduate and adult education courses at the University of Kent.
About the event
Witchcraft in seventeenth-century England has been the subject of countless stories and films but what was the reality behind the image? This talk examines the sad case of six women accused of witchcraft, who stood trial at Maidstone Assizes in the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector. How did they come to be there? And what does their case tell us about the ‘witchcraft craze’ that swept through Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Starting with a single, local witchcraft trial, this talk looks at the wider political and social context of the proceedings, and exposes the way rumour, accusation, indictment and trial could engulf communities and destroy lives.
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