Month: September 2019

I am pleased to say that I have just signed a contract with Four Courts Press, Ireland’s leading academic publisher, for a book entitled Athassel Priory and the Cult of St Edmund in Medieval Ireland, to be published in 2020. It will be the first book-length history of Athassel Priory as well as the first book dedicated to the Irish cult of St Edmund, King and Martyr (although my article on the latter subject was published in Downside Review earlier this year).

I became aware that St Edmund’s Irish cult was a woefully neglected subject during the course of writing my book Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King (2018), so exploring the Irish dimension seemed the obvious next step in my research. In the same way that the cult of St Edmund in England is intimately bound up with the institutional history of one monastery (Bury St Edmunds), so in Ireland the cult of St Edmund cannot be separated from the monastery that primarily fostered it, the Augustinian Priory of St Mary and St Edmund, King and Martyr at Athassel, Co. Tipperary. Although Athassel is not well-known outside Ireland, within Ireland it is renowned as one of the country’s largest complexes of monastic ruins, and there is a good literature on the material remains of Athassel by archaeologists and building historians. The institutional history of the monastery, however, has hitherto received little attention.

The forthcoming book will be much more than just a history of Athassel Priory, however. It will also trace the evolution of the cult of St Edmund in Ireland from the Anglo-Norman invasion to the post-Reformation period, when Edmund/Edmond (and its Irish equivalent Éamon) became popular personal names. The book sets the cult of St Edmund within the broader context of other cults of English saints in Ireland, and argues for a new concept of ‘devotional Englishness’: the idea that people of Anglo-Norman descent who defined themselves as ‘the English of Ireland’ did so partly via identifying themselves with distinctively English saints. The cult of St Edmund was thus a component of identity for people who considered themselves ‘English’ in medieval Ireland, but it may also have played more complex roles. The book will thoroughly analyse the cultural and political functions of the cult, arguing that although the cult was ultimately a devotional failure, it left behind cultural debris that remain part of Ireland to this day – not least the popular name Éamon and dozens of Edmund-derived place-names.

My review of Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe by Liesbeth Corens has just been published in Reviews in History. The book is an important contribution to the historiography of English Catholicism (and, more generally, the historiography of early modern migration) because it lays out a new paradigm for dealing with expatriate English Catholics. Dr Corens eschews the old idea of ‘Catholic exiles’ in favour of a much more nuanced understanding of the multiple reasons why English Catholics chose to live abroad. This is important because, as ongoing research continues to show, expatriates were central to the English Catholic community and much of what we know about that community comes from records and archives created and curated abroad. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the early modern English Catholic community.

I have just signed a contract with Bloomsbury Publishing to contribute a chapter to a new six-volume Cultural History of Magic due to be published in 2021. I shall be writing the chapter on ‘Authorities and Control’ for the volume on The Age of Enlightenment, edited by Dr Andrew Sneddon, which covers the period 1650-1800. The chapter will examine the ways in which both church and state attempted to control the practice of magic in this period, as well as the different models of authority adopted by magical practitioners for their own activities.

Why do so many people laugh, almost as an unthinking reflex, as soon as fairies are mentioned? This is a question that has intrigued me since I wrote a book about belief in fairies. I have been researching belief in witchcraft, magic and ghosts for many years, and some people question whether there is any point studying such subjects – but I do not encounter hilarity when I mention them. By contrast, I have found that even mentioning fairies makes some people laugh. I find it unlikely that people find fairies intrinsically funny; this is not the laughter of genuine amusement, but rather the laughter of ridicule – the way we might laugh at the stupidity of certain politicians, not so much because we find them funny but because we despair of their idiocy, and laughter seems the appropriate response. For some reason, laughter has become an ingrained cultural response (at least in the UK) to fairies, to belief in fairies, and even to the study of belief in fairies.

Is belief in fairies inherently worthy of laughter? There is nothing particularly amusing about some of the consequences of believing in fairies, such as the awful murder of Bridget Cleary, the Irish woman killed by her husband in 1895 because he was convinced she was a fairy changeling. Indeed, belief in changelings is a deeply distressing phenomenon that gives the researcher little to laugh about. The longer one spends studying fairy belief, the more disturbing it seems. The fairies are profoundly unheimlich: beings who are almost human, but not quite – interdimensional entities who emerge from their reality into ours to prey on us, and particularly on our children. In a sense, internet-generated urban legends like Slenderman, or indeed the modern mythology of extraterrestrials intent on abducting human subjects, comes closer to medieval and early modern fairy belief than contemporary belief in fairies, which often portrays fairies as little more than elusive yet ornamental guardians of the natural world. The fairies of medieval and early modern England were terrifying – creatures that would emerge from the ground to inflict disease and death on children and animals, and to lure humans into their own time-defying dimension. There is nothing funny about fairies.

So, if belief in fairies is not funny, is it simply ridiculous? There will be some people, of course, who will regard all supernatural belief as equally ridiculous. Most of us, however, even if we are not ourselves believers, have a tendency to rank supernatural beliefs by the respect we are willing to accord their adherents. We are likely to treat sincere believers in the great world religions with more respect than we might the adherents of a fringe cult, for example. In the UK in particular, belief in ghosts is part of the cultural mainstream (albeit still widely mocked by many) and reports about ghosts routinely appear in local and national tabloid newspapers. It is hard to imagine similar attention being paid to stories about fairies, but there is no obvious prima facie reason why belief in fairies is any more or less ridiculous than belief in ghosts. In the UK at least, confessing belief in the reality of some ghost sightings is generally socially acceptable in all but the most sceptical of settings. Belief in fairies, on the other hand, is often bracketed with belief in Santa Claus – something so utterly childish that no adult would confess it except in jest.

One reason for this may be that fairies are solely beings of folklore. There is no tradition that seeks to explain historic experiences of fairies in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms, as there is for ghosts. No contemporary parapsychologists (as far as I know) conduct serious research into fairies. The folkloric character of fairies casts them as inhabitants of an earlier, obsolete mental world. Yet unlike belief in a man in a red costume who delivers presents to all the children of the world in a single night, belief in fairies is not a twentieth-century invention for the benefit of children: it is a deep-rooted, organic tradition that is as old as our culture itself. If we accord beliefs respect on the basis of their antiquity and cultural importance, then belief in fairies is certainly a deserving recipient.

I suggest that there are three main reasons why people so often tend to laugh at belief in fairies. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that belief in fairies was an easy target of eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism. Unlike other supernatural beliefs, such as belief in witchcraft, belief in fairies required faith in an entire category of beings for which there was no solid sensory evidence. Belief in witchcraft, by contrast, was about interpretations of causality (‘My cow is sick because Mrs So-and-So overlooked it’, etc.) and therefore more difficult to undermine. But it was easy to deploy Ockham’s Razor against fairy belief: was it really necessary to posit an entire category of beings – a whole otherworld – to explain the phenomena that fairies were supposed to cause? Exactly how quickly belief in fairies declined in England, and for what reasons, is an intriguing subject in its own right that I do not have time to discuss here, but those who adopted disbelief in fairies were clear: the fairies could not exist, because there was no evidence for their existence, and no place for them in a disenchanted world.

A second reason why English people are particularly likely to greet any mention of fairies with hilarity and contempt is more political. Between the 1770s and the 1820s a huge debate raged in British and Irish politics about the admission of Catholics – who were predominantly Irish – into full civil and political rights. The debate culminated in 1829 with the emancipation of Catholics in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which resulted in the influx of Irish Catholic MPs into the House of Commons. Most of the English press consistently opposed emancipation, and one recurring argument was that the Catholic Irish were simply too superstitious to be allowed any say in governing themselves. Irish belief in fairies was often rehearsed as proof that the Irish were childish and incapable of governing themselves. To this day, many English people associate belief in fairies with the Irish, in spite of the fact that much avowed belief in fairies in modern Ireland has more to do with promoting tourism than it does with any genuine convictions. Yet the idea that fairy belief belongs to childish and undeveloped nations (as the British press still, apparently, imagines Ireland to be) is one that seems to have taken root in English culture. With it, all memory of English fairy belief seems to have vanished: many English people are unaware that their country even has fairy traditions, and associate fairies exclusively with the ‘Celtic’ nations of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

The third and final possible reason why people laugh at any mention of fairies may be the most disturbing of them all. Laughter, as is well known, is one response to fear. There is a long history of reluctance to speak openly about the fairies, including the use of euphemistic names for them. It is possible that some of the folkloric garb in which we dress fairies, and jocular stories associated with them, derives ultimately from our unease about them – in exactly the same way that the devil is frequently treated in a jocular fashion, or portrayed as a gullible fool, in much English folklore. While it seems unlikely that those who laugh at fairies are consciously afraid of them, could it be that laughter is a learnt cultural response whose original purpose was to disarm the power of the fairies themselves?

Tudor expert Natalie Grueninger recently interviewed me for her popular podcast ‘Talking Tudors’ about magic, witchcraft and ghosts in Tudor England – a suitable topic for broadcast on Friday 13th! I spoke, in particular, about cases from my 2017 book Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, but also mentioned my 2015 edition of The Cambridge Book of Magic, a rare manuscript of ritual magic from Tudor England, and two other wonderful books: Thomas Waters’s recent Cursed Britain and another edition of an early modern magical text, The Book of Oberon.

My article ‘Edward Kelley’s Danish treasure hoax and Elizabethan antiquarianism’ has just been published in Intellectual History Review. The article focusses on a single strange episode that occurred during the very strange partnership between Edward Kelley and John Dee, who collaborated together in what have become the best-known operations of ritual magic in sixteenth-century England. Treasure-hunting has always been a traditional pursuit of ritual magicians, and in spite of his aspirations to a purer and more exalted magic, Dee was no different. So in order to pander to Dee’s desire for buried treasure, in March 1583 Kelley returned from a winter spent in the Gloucestershire (then Worcestershire) village of Blockley, where he had family connections, with a vial of red powder, a scroll written in strange characters, and a book. Kelley claimed he had dug up these items on Northwick Hill, just above the village. The powder was the alchemical ‘powder of projection’ for which Dee had been searching, while the book was written by St Dunstan (popularly believed to have been a successful alchemist). The scroll took a while for Dee to decode, but it turned out to have been written in coded Latin by two Danish princes, who recorded in it where they had buried their treasure just before they were expelled from England.

That Kelley was hoaxing Dee is obvious, but the old view that Dee was an unusually gullible individual cynically exploited by Kelley is untenable. Kelley was forced to go to extraordinary lengths to deceive Dee, and nowhere more so than in the Danish treasure hoax, because Dee was one of the most learned men alive. Constructing the Danish treasure hoax pushed Kelley to the limits of his ingenuity. The article analyses the hoax, seeking to understand both why Dee was so willing to believe it and the likely sources from which Kelley constructed it. Ironically, the construction of a successful archaeological hoax must itself be a rigorous antiquarian exercise.

The article goes on to argue that archaeological hoaxes – both their construction and their unmasking – played a key role in the development of archaeology as a discipline, and that they remain valuable insofar as hoaxes help us to judge the limits of plausibility. Simply put, if we know the sort of thing that is likely to fool us then we can guard against deception. While some hoaxes are transparent as soon as professional archaeologists become involved, others (such as the infamous Piltdown Man hoax) had archaeologists fooled for years. Some suspected hoaxes, such as the ‘Venus’ figurine found at Grimes Graves in 1939, have never been definitively debunked for lack of evidence. Other hoaxes have been repeatedly debunked but nevertheless remain popular with the public (and, dare I say it, certain cable TV channels).

The Danish treasure hoax drew on the latest antiquarian research, local lore associated with the Blockley area, and folklore about St Dunstan and monastic experiments in alchemy. While I do not in any way intend to condone archaeological hoaxes, in the same way that hackers unintentionally help improve information security by showing what can and cannot be hacked successfully, so archaeological hoaxers show what can and cannot fool archaeologists and historians. In doing so they reveal flaws in human nature as well as in archaeological and historiographical methodologies. Ironically, the more archaeological hoaxes there are, the more carefully archaeologists will refine their methodologies and the harder it will become to hoax them. Studying the archaeological hoaxes of the past is especially revealing of the state of knowledge as it was at the time.

Ultimately, the Danish treasure hoax may have broken Dee; he seems to have remained convinced that he might find the treasure, even when he returned from his Bohemian adventure without Kelley and found himself excluded from Elizabeth’s court. Although he was appointed dean of the collegiate church in Manchester Dee died in penury, perhaps partly as a result of his penchant for dreaming up magical solutions to all his money worries. Kelley’s hoax was just too good, and Dee may never have seen through it.

My edition of Margaretta Greene’s novella The Secret Disclosed: A Legend of St Edmund’s Abbey has just been published, making this work available in print again for the first time in 158 years. The Secret Disclosed was originally published in 1861 and caused a local sensation in Bury St Edmunds, since many people believed it was a genuine account of events in the Middle Ages that explained the appearance of Bury’s notorious ‘Grey Lady’, a ghost reputed to haunt the Abbey Ruins. Greene claimed to have discovered a lost manuscript concealed in her home (built into the Abbey’s west front) which told the story of Maude Carew, a nun whose love for a monk of the Abbey led her to conspire with Queen Margaret of Anjou to poison Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in St Saviour’s Hospital during the Bury Parliament of 1447. The novella even inspired a riot in 1862 as people attempted to see ghosts which, according to the story, would appear every year at eleven o’clock on the night of 24 February. The crowd turned ugly when the ghosts failed to appear.

While the story of Maude Carew was a fiction entirely confected by Margaretta Greene, Greene never claimed the story was true, and therefore it is somewhat unfair to characterise it as ‘fakelore’ (deliberately fabricated folklore). However, it does seem that the story gave rise to reports of Bury’s Grey Lady, and various more-or-less garbled re-tellings of Greene’s book have been accepted as history. In reality, it seems that the reception of The Secret Disclosed is an example of a literary artefact informing what has become a folkloric tradition that now has a life of its own; sightings of the Grey Lady continue to this day, in various locations around Bury. However, until now the story that gave rise to all this has not been accessible. My edition includes a thorough introduction to Margaretta Greene herself as well as the history behind the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the archaeology of the west front of the Abbey and the literary context of the story. The book is thoroughly referenced and indexed, with a bibliography, and constitutes a thorough study of the novella as well as a critical edition of the text.