The Manningtree Witches: 'the best historical novel... since Wolf Hall'

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The adjective in the title of John Barnes’s treatise is apt; this book certainly feels uncomfortable, but important, too. He argues, for example, that all the initiatives to prevent racial abuse in UK football stadiums don’t stop racism as a conscious or unconscious act. Rather, they just allow us not to hear it for two hours. If Barnes has solutions, they are bound up in societal change and education rather than acts such as taking the knee. Passionate, confrontational stuff. The Manningtree Witches Manningtree has traditionally claimed to be the smallest town in England, but its 2007 population of 700 people in 20 hectares [3] and the 2011 census population for the civil parish of 900 are much higher than the 351 population of Fordwich, Kent. [4] However, it is believed to be the smallest town by area. [5]

Torture produced confessions but not the truth. Blakemore’s clear agenda is to give these silenced women a voice, and in fiction, she can thrust herself into Rebecca’s consciousness. The discipline of history doesn’t allow that, which often leaves it gesturing toward the silencing without being able to give it voice. AK Blakemore is also a poet, and The Manningtree Witches has been praised for its “poetic” writing style. I wish freely to embrace the deliciousness of sin. To sin with abandon is, after all, the only prerogative of the damned.”Rural England, 1643. Rebecca West lives with her mother in a rundown house, in the miserable hamlet of Manningtree. They manage to scrape a living as seamstresses but times are tough. Most of the men are away fighting wars and food is often scarce. It seems like the only prospect of hope or happiness for Rebecca lies in her crush on the town clerk John Edes, who teaches her Scripture once a week. Tongues are set wagging in the village upon the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, a wealthy and mysterious individual. A short time after, a local boy becomes ill with unusual symptoms, leading Hopkins and some other men to conclude that he has been possessed by the devil. Suspicion falls upon Rebecca's mother, and along with some other women she is arrested and charged with witchcraft. The only reason of my rating is because my expectations were different going into the book. My need for paranormal elements and a bit of witchcraft weren’t satisfied. However, putting my expectations aside, this book beautifully represents the reality of witch hunting and the struggles so many women had to endure during these times. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Historic England. "Methodist Church (1240124)". National Heritage List for England . Retrieved 23 July 2023. Alison Rowlands: "The idea being that that would give you proof, proof very much in inverted commas, that they were witches. But it amounted obviously to torture, because watching was effectively sleep deprivation. I don’t know if you’ve seen the image on the front of the pamphlet, the Hopkins publication in 1647, it shows him and two women on chairs and they would have been watched. They’d often be tied to the chairs with the familiars. But you could only do that in somebody’s home, because that could often go on for two or three days and nights and but you’d have local people helping, acting as, they were called watchers, they would actually watch to see what would happen. So there’s a massive communal investment of effort in the witch finding."

Taschen’s “The Library of Esoterica,” a series that begins with “Tarot” and “Astrology,” honors the history of mysticism and its democratization. Our NCW Book Club choice during April and May 2022 is The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore. We hope you’ll join us in reading the book, and that you’ll join the discussion in our Discord community or one of our discussion sessions taking place online and in person. Thanks to his success as a witch-finder, doing “God’s work” in the deeply pious counties of East Anglia, Matthew Hopkins gained tremendous notoriety. Emboldened by a profession long-supported by Church and State, and now charging extortionate fees, Hopkins anointed himself “Witch-finder General”, traveling all over Eastern England claiming to be officially commissioned by Parliament to uncover and prosecute witches. England, 1643. Puritanical fervor has gripped the nation. And in Manningtree, a town depleted of men since the wars began, the hot terror of damnation burns in the hearts of women left to their own devices. What does it mean if a novel can be “poetic” – can poems also be “novelistic” or “fictional”? Where do you personally draw the line between these different forms?Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,’ historical fiction about Kepler’s mother, is Galchen’s first novel since 2008’s ‘Atmospheric Disturbances.’ As Imogen Simon argues strongly in her documentary, these eight women of Manningtree were victims of misogyny as much as religious fervor. The highlighting of misogyny is correct and is often overlooked in discussions of witch-trials. Eastern England of the 1640s was a Puritan stronghold, a society in which women were considered culturally inferior to men. It was a culture in which women could be accused so readily of being witches. Alison: "If you want to bring an accusation against somebody, you would go to a Justice of the Peace (JP) and bring the charge. They would then start investigating it, and it’s at that point that John Stearne is brought into the procedure. Local people here asked John Stearne, who lived in Manningtree, to take their complaints to the JPs. The JPs asked Steame to help some of the investigations and then Matthew Hopkins got involved as well. It’s almost certain that Hopkins, Stearne, the accusers and the JPs met in pubs, because that’s where men of standing got together - in a meeting room in an inn. So I think any kind of local-ish pub that would have been around in the 17th century, you could probably make that case for." By 1616, Manningtree was prosperous enough to build for itself a new church; one featuring a monument to Thomas Osmond, who had been martyred in the town a century earlier. Osmond was revered in this part of the country; a member of the Protestant Christian sect that had separated from the Church of Rome during the Reformation of the early 1500s. His legacy of heresy against church authority was to be carried yet further in the late 16th century with a new reform movement, Puritanism.

Previous winner Lisa McInerney, who was one of this year’s judges, said that Blakemore “takes limited historical detail and, with what seems like effortless grace and imagination, crafts a breathing, complex world full of wrenchingly human characters, and tells us their stories in language that bears endless rereading, so clever and unexpected and pleasurable it is”.

They are more [talkative], and less able to hide what they know from others, and therefore in this respect, are more ready to be teachers of Witchcraft to others, and to leave [their teachings] to children, servants, or to some others, than men. A hill wet with brume of morning, one hawberry bush squalid with browning flowers. I have woken and put on my work dress, which is near enough my only dress, and yet she remains asleep. Jade. Pot-companion. Mother. I stand at the end of her cot and consider her face. A beam of morning light from the window slices over the left cheek. Dark hair spread about the pillow, matted and greasy and greying in places.

The characters seem to have changing personalities, in particular Rebecca’s. One time she’s well-read, strong and independent and the next she’s ignorant, foolish and naive. And that was not because of some scheme of hers as we follow her story in first person narration, so we very well know her thoughts and intentions. Witch hunting destroyed a universe of practices and beliefs whose existence was incompatible with capitalist work discipline and weakened women’s capacity to resist the reorganisation of social reproduction along capitalist lines. The women of Manningtree seek out the ancient Elizabeth Clarke for potions and charms to help them attract a husband or conceive a child. Like many older, poor but experienced women, Clarke is a contradictory figure. She is both respected and despised, both powerful and dependent. Fear and destruction take root in a community of women when the Witchfinder General comes to town, in this dark and thrilling debut.Satan has set upon [women] rather than on men ever since his unhappy appearance and corruption of Eve The Manningtree Witches is the second historical fiction book that we have read in the NCW Book Club – but it’s very different to A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee , which has a crime plot.