It has been a busy few weeks. Not one but two publications of mine dropped in the last couple of months, both open access. The first is the volume I co-edited with Cordelia Beattie and Suzanne Trill, Alice Thornton’s Books: Reassessing the Life Writings of a Seventeenth-Century Woman, which accompanies our digital edition of Thornton’s four autobiographies. This also contains my chapter ‘Health, Illness and Medicine in Alice Thornton’s Books’. If you like dogs as vectors of disease, dangerous melons, perilous cliff walks, spa breaks, and getting too cold in church, my chapter is for you!
The second is my ‘Reflections’ piece for the English Historical Review, ‘Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult in Premodern England’, which talks a bit about the state of the field and reviews four new-ish books in this area, by Marion Gibson, Tabitha Stanmore, and Frank Klaasen/Sharon Hubbs Wright. There was much, much more I could have said on this topic and these fabulous books.
Finally, I appeared on the English Heritage podcast with my good friend Will Wyeth as part of a special series on the Bayeux Tapestry, where we discuss the appearance of Halley’s comet in 1066 and all things SIGNS and OMENS. You can watch ‘Omens, Halley’s Comet and the Fall of Kings’ or listen to it on Spotify or wherever you usually get your podcasts.
