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    Dr Rebecca Warren

    Witchcraft in Seventeenth Century Kent: Murder and Mercy at the Maidstone Assizes

    image for Witchcraft in Seventeenth Century Kent: Murder and Mercy at the Maidstone Assizes

    Dr Rebecca Warren

    Rebecca Warren is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent, specialising in the religious history of the British Civil Wars and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. She is currently writing a monograph on ‘The Interregnum Church in England, c.1649-1662’. She is an historical consultant to the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon and has taught a range of early modern undergraduate and adult education courses at the University of Kent.

    About the event

    Witchcraft in seventeenth-century England has been the subject of countless stories and films but what was the reality behind the image? This talk examines the sad case of six women accused of witchcraft, who stood trial at Maidstone Assizes in the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector. How did they come to be there? And what does their case tell us about the ‘witchcraft craze’ that swept through Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

    Starting with a single, local witchcraft trial, this talk looks at the wider political and social context of the proceedings, and exposes the way rumour, accusation, indictment and trial could engulf communities and destroy lives.

    Tickets: Witchcraft in Seventeenth Century Kent: Murder and Mercy at the Maidstone Assizes

    Dr Rebecca Warren

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