What is Witching?
Witchcraft did not exist in isolation. It appeared alongside medicine, religion, law, prophecy, domestic life, neighbourhood conflict, ideas about the body, and changing understandings of the natural and supernatural world.
Witching follows these connections. It asks how extraordinary experiences were understood; how bodies, illness, belief, and authority became entangled; how accusations developed; and how individual experiences became stories that could be recorded, circulated, believed, challenged, and remembered.
A person could become a witch because a neighbour fell ill. A bodily experience might be understood as possession, a prediction as prophecy, or an unexplained event as evidence of supernatural intervention. A local dispute could become a legal case, and once recorded, these experiences could acquire lives of their own.
To study witching in early modern England is to study the processes through which extraordinary experiences acquired meaning, and through which those meanings entered the historical record.
This research has taken many forms: books, scholarly articles, individual case studies, archival investigation, editions of historical texts, and experimental research instruments. Witching brings them into conversation, placing close reading alongside new ways of exploring the historical record.
About Kirsten
Kirsten C. Uszkalo is a researcher and writer whose work explores witchcraft, possession, extraordinary experience, and the histories of people whose experiences challenged the boundaries of belief, medicine, and authority.
Her research focuses on early modern England, examining how accounts of witchcraft, possession, prophecy, illness, and other extraordinary experiences were created, investigated, recorded, and remembered. Her work brings together close reading, archival investigation, historical research, and the examination of patterns across large bodies of evidence.
She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and the monographs, Dark Sisters: Witches and Prophets in Early Modern England and Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession.