The Trial of the Pendle Witches: Exorcising Witches in Neo-Historical Poetry
The trial of the Pendle Witches in 1612 made history, as Poet Laureate Simon Armitage showed in his 2012 documentary, “The Pendle Witch Child“, which focussed on Jennet Device, the 9-year-old whose accusations led to 10—her own mother included—being hanged. Neighbourly jealousy, the stigma of povert...
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| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | The trial of the Pendle Witches in 1612 made history, as Poet Laureate Simon Armitage showed in his 2012 documentary, “The Pendle Witch Child“, which focussed on Jennet Device, the 9-year-old whose accusations led to 10—her own mother included—being hanged. Neighbourly jealousy, the stigma of poverty, the repression of non-conformism, patriarchal laws, and the credit given to the voice of one child had led to an unfair trial. This sensational trial quickly made it into writing, first, through Potts‘s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, a supposedly verbatim account of the trials which actually left aside a few facts while fabricating the voices of the accused, and later through many plays, novels and poems that participated in constructing a transhistorical image of the witch on a broomstick. More recently, and in the wake of the 400th commemoration of the events, some poets have recounted the trials so as to give a voice to their miswritten participants. The poems not only use historical data in their handling of the event, they also interrogate the process of history-making and writing history by experimenting with the poetic form and voice: multiple narratives, dialect writing, free spelling… are used to critically and creatively rewrite the Pendle trials. Some collections are intermedial; others are reconfigurations of former collections, thus calling into question the infallibility of the written word over other media. The use of prosopopeia or ventriloquism (Davies 2012) takes the form of an exorcism, the eviction of the evil forces of violent history by resorting to poetic experimentation and empathy. |
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