The Bewitching of Anne Gunter
A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England
-
- $69.99
-
- $69.99
Publisher Description
In 1604, 20-year-old Anne Gunter was bewitched: she foamed at the mouth, contorted wildly in her bedchamber, went into trances. Her garters and bodices were perpetually unlacing themselves. Her signature symptom was to vomit pins and "she voided some pins downwards as well by her water or otherwise.." Popular history at its best, "The Bewitching of Anne Gunter" opens a fascinating window onto the past. It's a tale of controlling fathers, willful daughters, nosy neighbors, power relations between peasants and gentry, and village life in early-modern Europe. Above all it's an original and revealing story of one young woman's experience with the greatly misunderstood phenomenon of witchcraft. James Sharpe is Professor of History at York University and the author of "Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in" "Early Modern History" and other works of social history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British historian Sharpe's (York Univ.) meticulously detailed reconstruction of a sensational English witchcraft case resonates with the modern era and throws a floodlight on the psychology of fear, gullibility, scapegoating, conformity and self-delusion. In 1604, 20-year-old Anne Gunter, during fits and trances in which she writhed, seemed to vomit and void such foreign objects as pins, accused three local women of bewitching her. Anne's supposed tormentors went on trial for witchcraft in 1605 (and were eventually acquitted). The trial was a dramatic affair, with Anne running through her repertoire of fits and symptoms, lying prostrate on the courtroom floor. Then Anne came under the personal scrutiny of notorious witch-hunter King James I, the king's physicians and Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Bancroft. She confessed that, under pressure from her father, gentry farmer Brian Gunter, she had faked her bewitchment to further his feud with the family of one of the accused witches, Elizabeth Gregory--a feud that began in 1598 at a football match. In 1606, father and daughter went on trial for false accusations of witchcraft before the infamous Star Chamber; regrettably, the disposition of the case is unknown. Sharpe views Anne's charade as a desperate attempt by an unloved, coerced child to gain her father's attention. His absorbing study is crammed with lore about demonic possession and the politics of exorcism, the European witch persecution craze, the bubonic plague of 1603 (which killed off one-fifth of London's population), demonological literature, Oxford (still a walled medieval city in 1600), daily life in English villages and the haphazard free-for-all of the early English criminal justice system.
