Religion and Ethics Forum
General Category => Literature, Music, Art & Entertainment => Topic started by: Robbie on April 06, 2017, 03:01:39 PM
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Radio 4 Extra, was on today.
Jeanette Winterson narrates a "spooky, lyrical documentary about the Pendle witchcraft trials of 1612".
I am going to listen to it shortly.
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I like the mint-cake. :)
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Interesting.
The inclusion of Diane Purkiss is a negative as she is primarily a writer whose interest in history is as a militant feminist. She has stated that witches were invented in order to prevent women, all witches were women, being seen as having any intelligence.
In one book she actually states that the stories of witches being burned in between 1430 and 1730 were invented and inflated to give modern witches their own Holocaust!
As a feminist she is rightly praised, as an historian of witchcraft she is a joke.
The programme, as a documentary on the Pendle Witches and their trial and execution, is fine, anything said about witches therein is, at best, ill-informed and horrendously out-dated.
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Yes but the numbers of witches burned often quoted is grossly inflated, although I've no idea why.
In my home county the number of witches executed runs into the hundreds but then this is Hopkins territory. Nearly all were hanged except those who supposedly killed their husbands. By contrast in my local town there is a memorial to a young man burned at the stake by Christians for being the wrong kind of Christian; burning was often the punishment for heresy, not witchcraft, at least in England.
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Thanksfor both your comments Owlswing and Rhiannon.
In the end i didn't get round to listening yesterday but intend to do so eventually. I wasn't thinking of the programme as a particularly authoritative work but from what I read, might find it interesting & Jeanette Winterson, of whom I'm a fan, narrates.
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Yes but the numbers of witches burned often quoted is grossly inflated, although I've no idea why.
Regrettably most of the exaggeration was done by two people, Margaret A Murray, and one of her disciples, Gerald Brousseau Gardner.
Gardner was a firm believer in the Murrayite theory (now almost totally discredited) that witchcraft had been an underground religious movement surviving from before the advent of Christianity. In his eagerness to create a history for his newly created Wicca he included more than a few porkies, 900,000 burned witches was just one of them.
In my home county the number of witches executed runs into the hundreds but then this is Hopkins territory. Nearly all were hanged except those who supposedly killed their husbands. By contrast in my local town there is a memorial to a young man burned at the stake by Christians for being the wrong kind of Christian; burning was often the punishment for heresy, not witchcraft, at least in England.
As you say, burning was the Catholic punishment for heresy which is why Kramer and Sprenger went to such pains to ensure that the women charged as witches confessed to having made a 'pact with the Devil' in order to receive their 'magic powers'. This allowed witches to be burned as heretics.
It was this and other inflated death-toll figures from various scources that Diane Purkiss used to justify her charge that witches were trying to create their own Holocaust by using these figures.
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I live in Nelson in the shadow of Pendle Hill so I'm very interested in any bs about the Lancashire Witch Trials.
Nick
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I live in Nelson in the shadow of Pendle Hill so I'm very interested in any bs about the Lancashire Witch Trials.
Nick
As long as you ignore Purkiss' contributions, the rest is pretty accurate! Unfortunately.
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I often wonder what Jesus would have thought of people, I use the term VERY loosely, burning other humans in His name ?!?!!?!?!?
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I often wonder what Jesus would have thought of people, I use the term VERY loosely, burning other humans in His name ?!?!!?!?!?
Well, yeah, Christians went in for human sacrifice to please their god comparatively recently when you think about it.
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I like the mint-cake. :)
That's Kendal not Pendle
http://www.mintcake.co.uk
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http://www.visitlancashire.com/inspire-me/pendle-witches/the-story-of-the-lancashire-witches
We are so lucky living today imo, even if we do have other worries.