Marion Gibson for Witchland

Marion Gibson is at Topping & Company Booksellers on Monday 31 August, talking about her new book Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain. It's part of the 'Haunted York' events, so it fits right into the city's long history of ghosts and gallows.

Witchland looks at witch-hunting in 1640s Britain, and it's built on newly uncovered historical records. Gibson's point is that these accusations didn't just drop from the sky; they grew out of the everyday tensions of the time — poverty, grief and resentment — and that ordinary people were the ones caught up in the persecution. It's less about the high-drama myths and more about the real lives that got crushed. Ronald Hutton, the historian behind The Witch, described her work as as close to an eye-witness view of the witch trials as we're likely to get.

Gibson is an Emerita Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter and has written nine books on witches in history and literature, including Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials and The Witches of St Osyth. She's been thinking about witches in history since she read her first account of a witch trial in a book lent to her on a dark, rainy afternoon some thirty years ago, so this isn't just a passing interest.

The talk is at Topping & Company Booksellers, 1 Museum Street, York YO1 7DT, starting at 7pm with doors open from 6.30pm.