Autumn is just around the corner, and as we creep closer to a change of season we are looking forward to the start of a new academic year. We’d like to take this opportunity to extend a special welcome to our new students joining the Faculty of Arts family this term. Read on to hear from some members of the Faculty.
Professor Karla Pollmann, Dean of the Faculty of Arts
As Dean of the Faculty of Arts, I am delighted to welcome you to the University of Bristol as you embark on this exciting new adventure. The Arts and Humanities are of great value to society, and are not only relevant, but vital in an ever-changing, unpredictable world. We look forward to seeing the creativity and innovation you – the next generation of linguists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, musicians – bring to your respective fields, and to helping you to develop some serious skills as future leaders with a special emphasis on civic engagement and social responsibility.
A key strength of the Faculty of Arts lies not only in the incredible depth and breadth of academic knowledge housed within, but also in its diversity, inclusivity, and sense of community. We pride ourselves on fostering a welcoming space, and our sincere wish is that your journey with us will be a cherished and transformative one. The opportunities available to you within the Faculty of Arts are many and varied – we ask you to be curious, to be imaginative, to be bold. Challenge yourselves, apply yourselves, and enjoy yourselves! Welcome!
Dr Shelley Hales, Faculty Admissions and Recruitment Officer
Hi and welcome to Bristol! My name’s Shelley, and as the Faculty’s Admissions and Recruitment Officer I have been busy over the summer overlooking all the A-Level results coming in. It’s always an exciting time of year to find out who our new students will be. I also teach in the School of Humanities, and like the rest of academic staff across the faculty I am busy getting ready for the term ahead, preparing classes, working in new research and latest knowledge (for me, as a Classicist, that means adding the very latest finds from Pompeii to my Pompeii class) and posting material on our unit Blackboard pages so that you have all the information you need to get started in Week 1. We’re all looking forward to meeting you and working with you as unit tutors and personal tutors. Every student has a personal tutor who is there to help you with university life. When you arrive, you’ll be hearing from us as we reach out to welcome you and get you oriented. Please do ask us any questions you have – that’s what we’re here for! In the meantime, very best wishes for your first days of being a Bristol student – see you in class!
Michelle Coupland, Faculty Manager
Welcome to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol. You’ve made a great decision to come and join our vibrant, supportive and dynamic community. Within the Faculty of Arts, we are proud to be bold, engaging and inspiring and I know that you will enjoy being a key part of our community. One of the things that I most love about this faculty is its friendliness – staff and students alike are smiling, encouraging and keen to support each other.
As an Arts graduate myself, I value the skills and techniques that my studies gave me and use them throughout my daily life (both in a professional work capacity and outside of work socially, too). I look beyond the information in front of me to see the wider and bigger picture, constantly ask questions to learn more, and knit different pieces of information together to come up with the best solution for all. Not only this, but I value the fact that I have interests (reading, literature and music) that I continue to pursue outside of work and which help to provide perspective (something that I have really come to appreciate in more recent times).
Welcome to the Faculty, and I look forward to seeing you around and saying hello to you.
Pumpkins have been carved. Costumes are being donned. Scary films are being watched from behind cushions and hands. Yes, Halloween is upon us once again, so we decided to delve into the past to find out more about the fascinating history of witchcraft. We’re joined (virtually!) by Dr Will Pooley, a social and cultural historian who gives us some interesting (and at times gruesome) insights. Read on, if you dare…
Trigger warning: the following interview contains mentions of violence and abuse.
Hi Will, thanks for joining us for this Halloween special. To many people, the word ‘research’ conjures up images of labs, safety goggles and petri dishes (all of which are important, of course!), but your area of research is quite different altogether and rather niche – can you tell us a bit more about it?
It’s true, I don’t spend a lot of time in a laboratory! My research is on modern histories of witchcraft. I focus on France, and on criminal trial records and newspaper accounts that deal with cases where people really did fear witches.
I’m certainly not the first person to notice these cases, but what I’ve been trying to do is get up close and personal with modern sorcery. Rather than just reading newspaper accounts – which often get things muddled up – I’ve spent a lot of time in regional archives taking advantage of the expertise and help of archivists who have worked to preserve the witness statements, medical reports, and other documents from nineteenth- and twentieth-century trials. I want to know what ordinary people thought and believed about witches, and the harms they believed that witchcraft caused.
That sounds fascinating! What do you think it is about witchcraft that people find so intriguing and has led to witch ‘stereotypes’ being so solidly linked to Halloween?
My colleague here at Bristol, Professor Ronald Hutton, recently wrote a wonderful book called The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present which really delves into why it is that so many societies around the world share a concept of the witch: a malevolent living human being who causes harm through supernatural means. One of the things I take from Professor Hutton’s work, as well as the equally brilliant book by Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, is that the stereotypes we have of ‘the witch’ do have a history.
A lot of people in Europe and North America will immediately picture similar images in their mind’s eye when you mention a witch: probably a woman, old, ugly, with a pointy nose, pointy hat, cat, broomstick, and cauldron. Of course, that is a cartoon image, but one of the things that the very long history of witchcraft around the world confirms is that witches have been thought of in many ways. Many societies have feared female witches, but others, such as early-modern Iceland, believed most witches were men. In some periods and regions, including the Democratic Republic of Congo today, it is children whose witchcraft has been most feared.
As for the link with Halloween, I have to confess I am no expert! What I would say is that while the connection between Halloween and the spirits of the dead is a longstanding one in western Christianity, witchcraft has – as far as I know – not been as intimately connected with Halloween. In my own research, I find that witches and witchcraft aren’t really tied to Halloween specifically. In fact, conflicts over witchcraft were probably more likely to bubble over during Carnival and other celebrations, when spirits were running high, and the wine, beer, or cider had been flowing!
Many people will have heard of seventeenth-century cases, such as the Salem witch trials in North America or the Pendle witches in Lancashire, but they may not be as familiar with the more recent history of witchcraft on which your research is focussed – what was it about this particular time period that sparked your curiosity?
I do find that a lot of people – even a lot of historians – are surprised when I say that I work on ‘modern witchcraft’, and that I mean fear of malevolent witches in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France.
In fact, a range of researchers have been working on this for many years. The historical field has really been led by Professor Owen Davies, who has written about a range of British, French, American and global examples. But as far back as the 1950s, the anthropologist Marcelle Bouteiller showed that fear of witches was very much still alive in France.
I’ve always been drawn to the mysterious and the supernatural, and I originally wanted to do my PhD on this topic. I’m glad I didn’t (great advice from my supervisor Professor David Hopkin!) because there is far too much material for a PhD. In fact, I know of close to 1,000 criminal trials or police investigations into cases involving witchcraft in France between 1790 and 1940, and there must have been a great deal more. Perhaps these cases are not as prevalent as during the most intense periods of witch-hunting in the early modern period, but they aren’t that rare! There are some villages and towns in western France where it seems as if there were witchcraft cases every few years in the nineteenth century…
This image of ’The Great Witch’ was one of many black and white postcards, often hand colourised, which caricatured rural life and were produced by printers around France. This one was made by Dugas et companie in Nantes.
How did perceptions of witches change following the decriminalisation of witchcraft in France?
So, witchcraft was effectively decriminalised in France in 1682, and definitively excluded from the new penal code in 1791. After that point, there were no grounds to prosecute people suspected of harmful magic for that magic alone.
How did this change perceptions of witches? Well I’ll give two contradictory answers – the truth is probably somewhere between the two!
The first is that it didn’t change perceptions that much. Many witches continued to be suspected of the same misdeeds: they caused illnesses in humans and animals, especially afflicting young infants, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and dairy cows. The stereotypes of the witch remained stable in many ways, too. Normandy had been a region of male witchcraft in the early modern trials and continued to be so in the nineteenth century. In fact, so many of the cases I have found are from Normandy and the west of France – where witches were also predominantly thought to be men – that male witches dominate my research, much to many people’s surprise. But other regions with fewer cases, such as the Occitan-speaking regions of southern France, preserved the patterns of female witchcraft they had displayed during the witch trials.
On the other hand, there are really important changes in how witches were perceived and dealt with. I’ll mention just three. First, the Catholic Church generally tried to distance itself from questions of witchcraft. That didn’t stop some local priests from getting involved in witchcraft disputes, but the general effect it had on perceptions of witches was dramatic. Where the early modern trials were often focused on uncovering evidence of a pact with Satan, the modern cases have lost this drive. The Devil does not feature in most of them at all.
Although the Catholic Church renounced responsibility for dealing with suspected witches, many of the rituals used by people who feared witches drew on Catholic rites, as in this image from Gaston Vuillier’s ‘Sorciers et magiciens de la Corrèze’.
The second change in perception is connected to French colonialism and imperialism. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries there was a progressive racialisation of thinking about ‘witchcraft’. Journalists and researchers did not find it convenient to dwell on the ‘superstitions’ of the French population, and preferred to associate belief in witchcraft with the colonised populations of north and central Africa, the Caribbean, Madagascar, and Indo-China. One of the most depressing examples concerns Hégésippe Jean Légitimus (1868-1944). As a representative of Guadeloupe, Légitimus was only the second black man elected to the French National Assembly, and the first in over a hundred years. But his time in Paris was dogged by tabloid coverage of accusations of ‘witchcraft’ in Guadeloupe directed against Légitimus and other socialists.
The final thing to say about new perceptions is just how easily witchcraft in France – as elsewhere across the globe – adapts to new situations and problems. In addition to bewitched cows, French men and women complained of enchanted automobiles and bicycles. They described feelings of bewitchment in terms of electricity, images seen at the cinema, and in the language of up-to-date psychiatric and medical theories, such as neurasthenia. It’s very easy to slip into the same language that newspapers at the time used to describe people who feared witches, which assumes that these people lived in rural areas. But the truth is, there were witchcraft disputes in all of the large cities, and even rural witchcraft cases often involved individuals who worked in nearby industrial centres, in mines, or factories.
What is the most common misconception people have about the history of witches and witchcraft?
The biggest mistake people make is to think that the history of witchcraft is over! The ways that we – including historians! – talk about the early modern trials as a ‘craze’ or a ‘panic’ imply that our ancestors briefly lost their reason, before cooler heads restored order. There’s actually a lot of work by historians now that questions this story of the progressive rationalisation and secularisation of criminal justice and elite culture.
It’s not the area I research myself, but I think one good way to put this story of progress into perspective is to ask: how many countries today have laws against witchcraft? Violent persecution of witches today is such a great problem that the United Nations Human Rights Committee and UNICEF have both been working on measures to combat the harms justified by fear of witches. Closer to home, the Metropolitan Police in London have a special unit devoted to cases of child abuse connected to spiritual beliefs.
I think it’s really important to be careful about the continuing racialisation of these harms in the media and by the authorities. UN agencies focus their attention on cases in sub-Saharan Africa, and a lot of the coverage of the cases in the UK has concerned immigrants, as in the terrible child abuse case in Haringey at the turn of the millennium. But from what I know of contemporary French cases, it would be hasty to assume that witchcraft disputes in Europe today are limited to immigrant groups. In Brive-la-Gaillarde in 2016, for instance, an old woman was badly assaulted by her family members for witchcraft. Many people who do know something about ‘modern witchcraft’ will assume that I research Wiccans and other modern pagans. But I’m more focused on the fact that, sadly, fear of witches and violence connected to sorcery have not gone away in Europe even today, although the scale may have greatly decreased.
Why is your research specifically – and arts and humanities research more generally – so important?
I’ve been very influenced by other historians who argue that history performs a similar function for society as literature does: it allows us to imagine how different things could be. And the advantage that history has over literature in this respect is that we know this is not just an imaginative possibility: I research events and processes that really did take place. The past contains vast and varied different ways of organising societies and culture.
It might seem that the topic of my research is something of a depressing one to choose from this point of view. Who wants to update their sense of progress by discovering that belief in witches has continued to cause serious harms into the present day in Europe? But I would say that we do have responsibilities to come to terms with that, and to adapt our own self-understanding to recognise that – perhaps – fear of witches runs so deep in our culture, or even in some more fundamental layer of the human mind, that it cannot simply be educated away in science lessons or religious studies. A suitably scary thought for Halloween?
But I don’t think it has to be understood in a purely negative light. Conflicts, and especially the most violent ones, glow in the darkness of our knowledge of the past. It’s much easier to find evidence, for example, where fears of witches led to tragic results. And that isn’t always what happened. It’s harder work, but I am very interested by cases where tensions were defused through the interventions of clergy, or healers, or local officials, or community leaders of some kind.
I know many historians are uneasy about learning ‘lessons’ from the past, but I do think it’s worth thinking about how some communities and authorities have succeeded not in eradicating the fear of witches, but in mitigating and alleviating the harms these fears can cause.
You know people for whom witchcraft is a real force in the world, even if you do not realise it. The problem is not how to persuade them they are wrong about this, but how to prevent a situation in which a belief like this could cause harm. I still have some faith in arts and humanities research to address real problems like this!
National Poetry Day is celebrated every year in October, encouraging people to discover, share and enjoy poetry in all its forms. To celebrate, we caught up with Dr William Wootten and Craig Savage of the Bristol Poetry Institute.
Why do you think observances such as National Poetry Day are important?
Craig: Poetry and public days of observance in England have been connected since John Dryden was appointed to the first poet laureateship. But long before that, from Demodocus in Ancient Greece, to the Courtly poets like Ben Jonson that preceded Dryden, poetry was aligned with moments of public ceremony, both momentous and solemn. National Poetry Day catches something of that, as well as what Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, said recently about the Bristol City Poet, that ‘Journalists capture facts but poets have the ability to speak to a city’s soul’ – the sense being that poetry has a role in offering a deeper understanding, a concentrated parsing, if you will, of current affairs. Which is not to say that poetry can’t also be private or intimate but to acknowledge poetry’s public face.
What role does the Bristol Poetry Institute play within the University and in the wider Bristol community?
Craig: Put simply, the Bristol Poetry Institute exists to be a voice for poetry. This may be the research, practice (in its widest sense), or reading of poetry, or any other aspect of poetry that engages communities, introduces poetry to a wider constituency, or encourages thinking about poetry. It’s our goal to collaborate and engage with our university and city communities on matters of poetry.
Some people took to new creative endeavours during lockdown, from baking and crochet to song-writing or learning a musical instrument – what advice would you give someone wanting to give poetry a try?
William: You wouldn’t start song-writing without listening to and loving a host of songs first, so I’d suggest starting out by reading and listening to as much poetry as possible, maybe learning some of your favourites by heart. Then, I would approach it as you would all the other creative endeavours you mention – as a craft. Try writing in different forms and styles, especially, but not exclusively, those used by poets you particularly like, and give yourself technical challenges. See if you can write something someone else might enjoy, but don’t fret about getting published. Philip Larkin once advised: ‘Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make Wimbledon? First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God.’
Who is your favourite poet and why?
William: Different poets suit different moods and different times in one’s life, and I’ve had crazes for all manner of poets over the years, so I won’t nominate an overall favourite. This year’s craze, though, is the early twentieth-century Italian poet Guido Gozzano. Gozzano’s best poems combine beauty and melancholy in a way that can be oddly reminiscent of Walter de la Mare, whose poems I happen to be editing. They also sound modern and intimate while employing traditional forms, a combination I often like to aim for when writing poems myself.
Craig: Controversially: Bob Dylan. Because, for me, poetry is meant to be performed, to have an audience, to be a popular art, to understand the demotic language, to be as much a thing of the body as the mind, and to draw through its breath the tradition in which it exists. To me, Dylan is our Homer, our Shakespeare; the figure of the 20th and 21st century that, like those great artists I mention, reaches across high and low culture to the widest possible audience, to tell, with great range and intensity, some of the truth.
What poem do you feel could help people find solace in these strange times?
William: There’s lots of poetry being written explicitly addressing lockdown and the corona virus, for instance the poetry at https://poetryandcovid.com/. But in poetry as in life, it is nature and love that tend to solace most:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joy and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
That’s the close to William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, a poem and a poet to turn to in a crisis.
This year marks the 250thanniversary of the death of Thomas Chatterton, a Bristol-born poet who died at just 17. What impact did Chatterton have on Bristol, and what’s the most intriguing fact you’ve learned about his short life?
Craig: Chatterton embodied for the Romantics that collision of prodigious talent and prodigious tragedy that has come to represent the Romantic Poet and the Romantic genre in general. I’m not a Romantic scholar but I would guess that Chatterton’s Bristol association must have added significance, for Wordsworth and Coleridge, to their publication of Lyrical Ballads in Bristol in 1798 – which is to say that Chatterton laid the groundwork for Bristol’s incredible Romantic heritage. It’s not a fact, but the most intriguing thing I’ve learned about Chatterton is his connection to St. Mary Redcliffe and the fantastic opportunities that site offers to engage with the history of Chatterton in Bristol. One great way to do this, especially around National Poetry Day, is to download the Romantic Bristol app from our website. The app, developed by our colleagues Professor Ralph Pite and Dr Rebecca Hutcheon, maps out, for example, a self-guided walking tour around Redcliffe of Bristol’s Chatterton heritage.
For anyone interested in finding out more, how can they get involved with the Institute?
Craig: We regularly offer poetry events. For National Poetry Day we have Poetry Karaoke and then, in November, we have our Annual Reading, which will feature American poet Claudia Rankine and Bristol’s former City Poet Vanessa Kisuule. Aside from our events, we’re keen to hear from those working with poetry – schools, community organisations, poets, poetry academics – and to engage in a dialogue with them about how we might collaborate.
Third year History with Innovation student Jasmine Smellie talks to us about her degree, studying Innovation and why she made the right choice.
Before joining University, every time I mentioned I wanted to do an arts degree, the question that very quickly followed on was “what can you do with an arts degree?” In reply I would say “well what can you not do,” because I was confident in the skills I would acquire through university would set me with a range of understanding that could be moulded into any job position.
“I realise now how much I underestimated the true breadth of skills an arts degree could bring”
However, admittedly I remained secretly sceptical about what career it was, exactly, I was wishing to pursue. Since actually now studying History with Innovation, my perception has only got stronger. I realise now how much I underestimated the true breadth of skills an arts degree could bring, from analytical and comparative studies into textual information, to improved communication skills and learning how to work in teams.
“Some advice I would give to a new starter of an arts degree at University is to really have faith and belief in your own decisions and that you have chosen the right course for you”
Through Innovation, I have learnt skills that I have been able to apply during the summer whilst working at a cloud software based company, an internal communications design agency, and a variety of creative studios around Bristol. Which truly highlighted to me that when applied, the skills you acquire (sometimes unintentionally) through an arts based subject really can put you in good stead for any career area.
Some advice I would give to a new starter of an Arts degree at university is to really have faith and belief in your own decisions and that you have chosen the right course for you. Be confident to throw yourself into as many things you can, from drama and music, to working with the engineering and computer science based societies. The key is to explore all different areas, get to know what you like and dislike and where your strengths lie, but also see which areas you require people to work with you in order to create something.
Follow Jasmine’s blog on Linkedin for more information on studying Innovation and her internship experience at Home design studio in Bristol.
People often talk about the creative aspects of Arts and Humanities, but I was drawn towards studying History because I enjoyed the idea of challenging established facts and ideas. This has only grown through my Bachelors and Masters degrees, and now at PhD level I get the chance to design the questions I want to answer, and work out how to answer them.
My PhD research looks at the British community in Hong Kong from 1980 to 2000, tracking how it changed in preparation for the handover of the territory to China in 1997. Researching for this has taken me all over the UK, to the US, and to Hong Kong, allowing me to collect a variety of sources and interview many different people. Now in the final stages of my PhD, I am weaving these sources together to form a narrative that hopefully gives a unique insight into a relative recently period of history.
The Arts and Humanities have a reputation for exclusivity, and distance from the ‘real world’, but I have found this to be patently untrue during my studies. The stories I uncover on a daily basis, through newspapers, diaries, oral histories, letters, and other countless sources, put ordinary people at the centre of the historical narrative. They often have similar hopes and fears as people do today, and provide us with valuable insight into their period, and how it relates to today’s events.
History is also about developing skills that we sometimes take for granted. During my years of study I have learned how to research and find information quickly, comprehend the meaning of documents, and synthesise these into a narrative that can be written up. These skills are useful in everyday life, and I have used them extensively in jobs I have held during my studies.
The best thing about studying History, and the Arts and Humanities, is discovering the links between the city and country you live in, and much wider narratives. It helps give meaning to the streets you walk down everyday, and things we take for granted in everyday life, especially in a deeply historical city like Bristol. It also means that people here are interested in and care about the Arts and Humanities, and the times I have interacted with them at talks, debates, and exhibits have been the most rewarding of my time at university and remind me that arts matter outside the university just as much as inside.
Why do arts matter? Over the coming months, we will be asking staff, students and alumni this question, sharing their stories of learning and research, and shining a spotlight on the Faculty of Arts.
What would a world without the arts and humanities be like? Without music, drama, literature, history, the visual arts? The arts and humanities give us the tools to learn about other cultures, other people, other ideas. They help us to understand who we are and where we come from. They also give us ways to appreciate and value things that we don’t understand.
The arts are an intrinsic part of what it means to be human – they’re threaded through everything we do and everything we are.
Professor Karla Pollmann, Dean of the Faculty of Arts
Dr Shelley Hales, Faculty Admissions and Recruitment Officer
Michelle Coupland, Faculty Manager
