Dr Mark Biram tells us about his project to empower young girls in Brazil through participation in football. Mark is working closely with Brazilian NGO Meninas em Campo (Girls on the Pitch), as well as leading academic on women’s sport in Brazil, Silvana Goellner, to achieve this aim. The project has recently received an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account award, aligns with the University’s efforts to achieve social justice both at home and abroad, and is yet another example of how arts and humanities research can influence change for the better.
Meninas Em Campo, translates as Girls on the Pitch in Portuguese
With help from the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, in collaboration with a Brazilian NGO Meninas em Campo and leading academic on women’s sport in Brazil, Silvana Goellner, we are designing a project aimed at the empowerment of young girls through participation in football from a young age. Our project will raise awareness of crucial social, economic and logistical barriers which currently discourage or prevent girls from participating in football, providing practitioners with a blueprint to replicate the work of Meninas Em Campo (Girls on the Pitch), a project which uses football as a vehicle for the empowerment of girls and to help them negotiate the difficulties of adolescence.
Meninas Em Campo has proved itself to be a highly successful proactive example of promoting gender equality through both discourse and practice. It is a non-profit organisation located in Butantã, São Paulo which offers a space for 9-17 year old girls to develop as footballers. The project is financed by Colégio Santa Cruz and supported by the University of São Paulo. Meninas Em Campo is the largest grassroots socially motivated girls football project, outside of those of the big clubs.
Why is this research important?
Whilst carrying out ethnographic research with Santos FC Women in 2018 & 2019 I became aware of the lack of formalised spaces for girls to play the game from an early age. At present, all major Brazilian clubs have a women’s team, in order to comply with national and international regulations. However, there is still a lacuna in provision for younger girls. Projects like Meninas em Campo provide a blueprint which can be replicated elsewhere.
What does the research project involve?
The project involves producing and disseminating materials which practitioners can use to attract girls to playing the game in the first instance, and to engage them with the wider issues attached to gender and other inequalities through the lens of sport. The project intends to engage with secondary schools across Brazil showcasing the best practices of Meninas em Campo and providing the schools with a range of materials which they can use to develop their own provision for girls’ football.
What are the next steps for Girls on the Pitch?
After the initial scoping trip in January, we have already applied for a further round of funding with a view to producing a guide for practitioners on how best to optimise opportunities to raise issues of gender inequality, problems faced by girls during adolescence and how best to engage the public and private sector into investing in the women’s game. This guide is led by the findings of Dr. Mark Biram’s PhD thesis Women’s Club Football in Brazil and Colombia: A Critical Analysis of Players, Media and Institutions and by the work of Hispanic, Portuguese & Latin American Studies PhD candidate Júlia Belas Trindade, who has published a series of Guardian articles on the growth of the women’s game.
We wish Mark every success with Girls on the Pitch and look forward to seeing how the research project develops.
Dr Mark Biram is an early career researcher and teaching associate in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. To find out more about Mark’s research, please email mark.biram@bristol.ac.uk.
By Professor Ulrika Maude, Director of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science
The Centre for Health, Humanities and Science (CHHS) focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research at the intersection of the humanities, health, medicine, and science. The CHHS was inaugurated in 2017 and it has almost two hundred members from across Bristol University’s six Faculties and from the NHS. It runs a regular research seminar with speakers from across the UK as well as from abroad, and hosts workshops, an annual lecture, public debates, mentoring lunches, funding workshops, postgraduate-led activities, and university-wide networking events.
CHHS members are at the forefront of developments in medical humanities research, disseminating their results through academic publications, events and public engagement activities. With the support of the Wellcome Trust and the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute, the CHHS has provided seed-corn funding for a diverse range of research projects, including grief and mourning; the senses; chronic conditions and their narratives; and health and illness in colonial film archives.
One CHHS seedcorn-funded project, Becoming Elizabeth Blackwell, centres on the Bristol-born doctor and social campaigner Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) – the first British woman to be registered as a doctor by the General Medical Council, in 1859. The project has brought together Bristol academics, a playwright and theatre director, medical students and others to produce a playscript that will re-tell and celebrate Blackwell’s life and achievements.
Several CHHS members are currently involved in collectively writing a book on Key Concepts in Medical Humanities (forthcoming, 2024), which will provide a critical introduction to concepts such as ‘health’, ‘illness’, ‘contagion’, ‘feeling’, ‘neurodiversity’, ‘disability’, and ‘dying’, as well as offering chapters on key methodologies such as ‘Black Health Humanities’, ‘Graphic Medicine’, ‘Medicine and the Arts’ and ‘Narrative Medicine’. ‘Health’, for instance, is by no means a transparent concept, and the CHHS’s former Benjamin Meeker Professor, Alexandra Parvan, argues that ‘health cannot be taken merely as the outcome of biological tests or a clean medical sheet, nor should it necessarily be understood as a state restricted to the those designated as clinically healthy.’ Rather, Parvan argues for a nuanced conception of health, one that is ‘accessible to all’.
Current large-scale research initiatives at the CHHS include Sensing Spaces of Healthcare, led by historian Victoria Bates. Poor hospital design has a negative impact on healthcare outcomes, and the project seeks to rethink the NHS Hospital through the body and the senses, focusing on the lived experience of patients, visitors, and hospital staff with the aim of improving hospital design. And a multidisciplinary team led by philosopher Havi Carel has recently won Wellcome Trust funding for a six-year project on Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare (EPIC), which aims to address inequalities. Havi says,
‘Some patients have reported that their testimonies and perspectives are ignored, dismissed, or explained away by the healthcare profession. These experiences are classified by philosophers as ‘epistemic injustices’ because, in some cases, they are based on prejudice and can jeopardise patient care and undermine trust in healthcare staff and systems.’
EPIC aims to identify practical measures that can be taken for the benefit of patients and healthcare practitioners alike.
The Good Grief Festival, inaugurated in 2020, focuses on supporting those affected by the shared experience of bereavement and grief – topics that have for too long been considered taboo. Led by Lesel Dawson (English) and Lucy Selman (Bristol Medical School), ‘Good Grief’ regularly organises talks, interviews, webinars and workshops for the general public concentrating on the ways in which the crushing experience of grief can be shared and managed.
Notable projects from recent years include The Heart of the Matter exhibition, which toured the UK in 2018. The exhibition grew from artist Sofie Layton’s residency at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and was co-organised by CHHS Advisory Board member and bioengineer Giovanni Biglino. The artworks in the exhibition were inspired by young patients with heart conditions – as well as their families and doctors – and it invited visitors to discover the extraordinary complexity, intricacy and beauty of the heart as an organ.
For many years now the Centre has been involved in medical education through the Intercalated BA in Medical Humanities, an optional one-year degree for students of Medicine and Veterinary Science, taught jointly by English and Philosophy and directed by Advisory Board member, John Lee (English). With a wide range of international collaborators and an International Advisory Board, our members are also active in public engagement work through collaborations with the NHS, patient groups, and charities as well as museums, public gardens, libraries, and other cultural organisations.
For more information about the CHHS, please contact the Centre’s administrator, Elizabeth Gourd (e.c.gourd@bristol.ac.uk).
Professor Ulrika Maude, Centre for Health, Humanities and Science Director
By Dr Adrian Howkins and Dr Paul Merchant, Co-Directors of the Centre for Environmental Humanities
The stories we tell about the environment and the images we make of it end up shaping the environment itself, for better and for worse. This is one of the key principles of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings together historians, literary critics, philosophers, scholars of visual culture, cultural geographers, and more.
As the COP27 climate change summit gets underway in Egypt this week, it is striking to note how little coverage the summit has had in the media, especially when compared with the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year. It seems that expectations of meaningful progress are low, despite stark warnings from the UN that drastic action is needed. The environmental humanities can help us understand how we have arrived at this point, and reflect on how culture can play a role in building a more hopeful future.
The Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol, established in 2017, has rapidly built a reputation as one of the leading centres in the field. Our community spans all of the disciplines in the Faculty of Arts, and our members include postgraduate researchers, professors, and all career stages in between.
We support our academic members in developing their research ideas, by providing seed funding, and supporting applications for external grants – recent funded research from Centre members includes Andy Flack’s ‘Dark Pasts’ project and Paul Merchant’s ‘Reimagining the Pacific’ project, both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We are particularly proud of our vibrant postgraduate community, whose members organise reading groups, workshops and the Literary and Visual Landscapes seminar series (you can watch a recording of their most recent seminar).
The River Avon at low tide. Credit: Kristoffer Trolle, CC-BY 2.0
“It’s really great being part of the Centre for Environmental Humanities here at Bristol. Being involved in a community of researchers from many different disciplines—from History, English, Geography, and many others—is incredibly stimulating. It’s a genuinely creative melting pot centred around a brilliant programme of events, seminars, reading groups, and field trips.”
Milo Newman, PhD student in the School of Geographical Sciences
In the 2022-23 academic year, we are exploring the future of the environmental humanities – where does the field need to go next? Where are the gaps in current research? How can our interdisciplinary community of scholars and students at Bristol shape new developments? With these questions in mind, we will be holding a special workshop in February 2023, with internal and external participants.
Over the next few years, we are also looking to expand our network of international partners. This year, we established a formal partnership with the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger in Norway and the Environmental Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Partnerships provide opportunities for visiting fellowships, networking, and collaborative grant applications to our members. We are also developing a series of co-hosted online seminars on environmental humanities in Latin America with the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University (USA). Professor Gisela Heffes from Rice will be visiting as a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in May and June 2023.
Collaboration both within the University and with community partners, including Bristol’s Black & Green Ambassadors and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership, is fundamental to our work, and the Centre is at the forefront of interdisciplinary innovation. One recent initiative, ‘Keywords in Environmental Research and Engagement’, worked with a range of community organisations across the city and academics from different disciplines to explore how to generate a common understanding of key terms like ‘resilience’ and ‘transitions’.
We’ve also been promoting a place-based approach to collaborative scholarship, where we use field trips to provide a focal point for interdisciplinary conversations. Recent field trips have included visits to the Island of Lundy (see our co-authored article), Exmoor, and the Brecon Beacons. We’re planning to continue these field trips this coming academic year with visits to the See Monster in Weston-super-Mare and to the Somerset Levels.
We are very excited to be developing a new MA in Environmental Humanities, which is due to start in September 2023. You can find out more and apply on our website.
By Dr Saima Nasar and Professor Madhu Krishnan, Co-Directors of the Centre for Black Humanities
The Centre for Black Humanities is an international hub for Black Humanities research in the heart of Bristol. The Centre aims to foster the broad range of research currently being done at the University of Bristol around the artistic and intellectual work of people of African descent. Some of our current interdisciplinary projects include Dr Josie Gill’s research on ‘Black Health and the Humanities’, Dr Elizabeth Robles’ work on Black British Art, and Dr Justin William’s project on UK Hip-Hop. Other research projects include those relating to ethics and social justice, literary activism, and slavery and its legacies.
The Centre is committed to reaching audiences outside the traditional university through a diverse programme of film screenings, reading groups, performances, and research collaborations with local communities. Such activities enable our research to generate impact in other areas including the cultural industries and higher education policy.
Our main priorities as a Centre are: collaboration, interdisciplinarity, engagement, exchange, and internationalism. The Centre works with academics, artists and practitioners – nationally and internationally – to produce world-leading research in Black Humanities. We work across disciplines in the Arts and Humanities but also beyond, with researchers in the Sciences and Social Sciences. Centre members also facilitate a wide range of public engagement activities based on our research in local, national and international settings, working with museums, charities and other organisations to deliver high-quality, non-academic outputs.
Additionally, we have active research partnerships with local writers, artists and grassroots organisations in Bristol. These help create high-profile opportunities for mutual exchange and collaboration on issues of local and national importance. We also have academic and creative partners in Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Angola, Portugal, Brazil, and the US, amongst others. A list of our international board members can be found on our website.
The Centre has had a series of visiting scholars join us. In 2021, we were delighted to host Professor Nicola Aljoe. Professor Aljoe’s research is on Black Atlantic and Caribbean literature with a specialisation on the slave narrative and early novels. She described her time in Bristol:
‘Despite the ongoing COVID pandemic, my sojourn at the Centre for Black Humanities in Bristol during the fall term of 2021 was an incredibly productive and intellectually engaging experience. I conducted research in the Bristol archives on two related projects. The first was the creation of a digital map of the various locations associated with Black people in 18th – century London through the lens of Ignatius Sancho. The second project was my book manuscript on representations of women of colour from the Caribbean in fictional European texts between 1790 and 1830. Such data productively challenges notions of absence of Black people in the archives of Britain at this time, and provides more details about the complexities of their lives.’
The Centre offers exciting opportunities for our early career and postgraduate community, through cutting-edge research and dialogue with arts and community activists. This year, Adriel Miles, Alice Kinghorn and Francis Asante are coordinating a programme of events. Francis explained:
‘The Centre plans to organise a number of postgraduate research (PGR) seminars and reading groups. Two seminars are planned for the first teaching block on topics related to the exploration of racial communities in online spaces, and the relationship between race, music, and cultural politics. These events are designed to encourage a sense of community in the Centre, and to provide a space for learning and socialising. Preparations for the seminars are still ongoing, and further information about them will be shared soon.’
We are delighted to launch five Faculty Research Centres (FRC) for a new cycle of five years of funding at the University of Bristol. They are:
Black Humanities
Creative Technologies
Environmental Humanities
Health, Humanities and Science
Medieval Studies
We like to think of the FRCs as the crown jewels in the Faculty’s glittering treasure chest of activist, interdisciplinary research. The five Centres showcase arts and humanities research at the cutting edge of new knowledge, asking key questions about themes and issues critical to the city of Bristol, the people of the West of England, and the world.
Each Centre has developed a diverse programme of activity including public lectures and debates, workshops and seminars, conferences and collaborations that engage colleagues and the public beyond the University.
Here is a sneak preview of some of the many Centre activities and opportunities that we can look forward to this academic year:
The Centre for Black Humanities has a postgraduate research (PGR) group planning a series of seminars, reading groups and away days.
The Centre for Creative Technologies will co-design sandbox events (isolated testing environments) with civic partners – the Pervasive Media Studio and Knowle West Media Centre – to explore social applications of arts and technologies.
As part of the Centre for Creative Technologies, Bristol Common Press will host a global summer school on Technologies of the Book, which will run for three weeks in summer 2023.
The Centre for Environmental Humanities has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the environmental humanities ‘Greenhouse’ at the University of Stavanger, demonstrating the positive potential for partnership working.
The Centre for Environmental Humanities plans to host a ‘Future of the Environmental Humanities’ workshop that will bring together researchers to think about the question of what comes next for the field of environmental humanities.
The Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS) has a regular seminar series including one session on ‘What every medievalist should know…’.
The Medieval Studies Global Professor, Kathleen Kennedy, has developed links with the Bristol Central Library, and is planning an ambitious exhibition of medieval manuscripts in Bristol libraries and archives.
The Centre for Health, Humanities and Science plans a symposium on ‘Hoarding’, convened by Andrew Blades.
The Centre for Health, Humanities and Science is planning its first collaborative book, Key Concepts in Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic), to be published in 2023.
Each Centre will have its own site on the Bristol Blogs platform through which they can showcase their research and activities.
In May 2022, the University of Bristol announced the launch of the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research, the first academic research centre to specialise in addressing the impact of gambling harms across Great Britain. Through taking new and multidisciplinary approaches, the Hub aims to build a greater understanding of gambling harms, leading to evidence-based action to prevent and reduce the negative impacts of gambling.
We caught up with Professor John Foot, Professor of Modern Italian History, to hear about his role in the Hub, and to learn more about the importance of the Arts and Humanities in interdisciplinary research.
Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research
Professor John Foot
It is rare to be involved in a project that covers six faculties in the University, but the new Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research, funded by the Gamble Aware charity, was just such a bid. The Hub will seek to increase understanding and awareness of the dangers of gambling, and covers public health (from a number of perspectives); social and geographical research into gambling; the interactions between gambling and poverty; the role of advertising; the history, economics and politics of the gambling industry; and the psychology of gambling, among many other areas.
This £4-million+, four-year project will allow for an unprecedented series of interactions between expert researchers across a range of different departments and schools in a way which has hardly ever been seen in any institution. The Hub aims to make concrete recommendations for the treatment of gambling addicts and the reform of the gambling industry. It will provide a forum for debate and the dissemination of research, policy discussions, and publications, as well as funding for PhD students and a lectureship in gambling studies.
The role of the Arts and Humanities
In terms of the Faculty of Arts, the Hub will bring together academics from Modern Languages and other disciplines – including Anthropology, History and Philosophy – to cover a range of focus areas, such as the ethical implications of gambling, debates around advertising, and the history of how gambling has changed and evolved.
My particular areas of interest involve research into the long history of illegal gambling, the deep connections between gambling and corruption in professional sport, and the development of gambling from a rigidly controlled activity carried out in person using cash in betting shops to one using digital and phone technology. Other key areas being investigated include the connections between the illegal and legal sectors, and the ways in which gambling has led to numerous sporting scandals.
Some ex-footballers with gambling issues, such as former England goalkeeper Peter Shilton, have become campaigners against advertising in sport. One of the aims of our research will be to connect these campaigns and campaigners and their personal experiences of gambling addiction.
There are also ongoing and long-running debates around the ethics of betting advertising during sport, and the connections to match and spot-fixing which has affected sports in a serious way, in particular within football, tennis, snooker and cricket. Major sporting scandals have arisen around betting connections to match fixing and other forms of fixing, such as Calciopoli in Italy in 2006.
The importance of multidisciplinary research
Academic colleagues joining me to help develop these research ideas include Professor Matthew Brown and Professor Martin Hurcombe, experts on sport in South America and France, respectively. They bring historical and other methodologies to bear on this subject, as well as access to networks in specific regions (such as Argentina, Brazil and Colombia) and expert areas (such as sports specialists). The Hub will also tap into networks and expertise provided by the Brigstow Institute, which has a special emphasis on local actors and coproduction of research.
Another key area of study for the Hub is the transition of gambling from an activity which had boundaries and borders, to the ability to bet internationally on an almost limitless variety of events, and through mobile phones and computers. The study of this transition and its effects on the spread, impact and business of gambling is essential to an understanding of harm reduction and how it can be brought about today.
By Professor Adrian Howkins, Department of History
In early July 2022, Bristol will play host to the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference. The conference – which usually takes place every two years – will have the overarching theme of ‘Same planet, different worlds: environmental histories imagining anew’.
This is only the second time the ESEH conference has taken place in Britain, and the first time it is happening in England – the first ever ESEH conference took place in St Andrews in Scotland in 2001. The decision to hold the conference in Bristol reflects the strength of environmental history research at the University of Bristol, as well as the city’s strong environmental reputation. More broadly, it reflects the strength of the University of Bristol in the wider field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history research.
“Environmental humanities are interdisciplinary areas of research, combining the traditional humanities – such as literature, music, history and languages – with areas including science and technology to better understand the relationship between humans and their surrounding environment, both social and natural. Environmental humanities can help us learn about the environmental challenges of the past, address those of the present, and plan for the future.”
The University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH) in the Faculty of Arts is firmly established as one of the leading centres for environmental humanities research in the UK, and there is a wide range of exciting projects taking place. Do follow our CEH blog to keep up with everything that is going on.
Centre for Environmental Humanities field trip
In preparation for the ESEH coming to Bristol, Adrian Howkins – one of the co-directors of the CEH – spoke to Marianna Dudley and Andy Flack who are organising the conference.
What is the European Society for Environmental History?
[Marianna] The ESEH is the leading scholarly organisation for people interested in environmental issues from a humanities perspective. It is European, but that doesn’t exclude people in other parts of the world working on this topic. It is very inclusive, and has grown to include a wide range of scholars. It offers networking, mentorship, peer-to-peer support, and a discount on the Environment and History journal. It also has by far the best academic conference going, which moves around Europe and is coming to Bristol this summer!
Why is it important that the conference is coming to Bristol?
[Andy] It recognises Bristol’s status as an environmentally aware and activist city as well as recognising that the University is involved in environmental issues through the Centre for Environmental Humanities, the Cabot Institute, and other research centres and clusters. It is the first time the ESEH has been in the UK since the first meeting in 2001 (St Andrews), and the first time in England. The decision to come to Bristol shows that despite political developments like Brexit, the United Kingdom is still at the heart of the European scholarly community studying environmental change. We love living and working in Bristol – it’s a fun, vibrant, welcoming city and we want to show our colleagues from around the world what a great place Bristol is.
What impact do you hope to have as a result of the conference?
[Marianna] It felt more important than ever to have an in-person conference after such a long hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re looking forward to bringing our scholarly community together and reforging the connections that are so important to our work. In terms of academic legacies, we want to spotlight Bristol as a place to study environmental history and environmental humanities. We hope that other scholars around Britain will seek us out for postgraduate research, postdoctoral fellowships, and academic collaborations, maintaining and building the exciting work that is already taking place.
What opportunities are there for our students to get involved in the Centre and/or the Conference?
[Andy] There will be opportunities for students to get involved in the running of the conference. This will put our students in touch with scholars from all around the world. Please get in touch if you might be interested in joining our conference team. If anyone would like to attend the conference to see what it’s all about, we’ll be offering day rates for University of Bristol staff and students to come to talks and meet with conference attendees. There will be interactive environmental art installations, a talk on wildlife film, science and humanities conversations, and a poet in residence.
If you would like to register for the conference, you can find further details here.
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!
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.
