The Manningtree Witches: 'the best historical novel... since Wolf Hall'

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Torture produced confessions but not the truth. Blakemore’s clear agenda is to give these silenced women a voice, and in fiction, she can thrust herself into Rebecca’s consciousness. The discipline of history doesn’t allow that, which often leaves it gesturing toward the silencing without being able to give it voice. How did you feel while reading the novel when the outcomes of the East Anglian witch trials are commonly known?

Rebecca tells us the story in her own voice, and it is certainly not the voice of a shrinking victim. She may be powerless but she has strong opinions and a rebellious nature, and a sense of humour that helps her through the darkest times. She recognises the unfairness in society between rich and poor, man and woman, but there’s nothing she can do to change that so her aim is to get through life as best she can regardless. She has the benefit of physical attractiveness, but her low social status means that men are likely to look to her for sex rather than marriage. She doesn’t think of her mother and her friends as witches, but she knows they have a lot of superstitions, use folklore remedies in treating illnesses, a There have been several books recently on witch trials( with another one from author Chris Bohjolian soon to be releasesd) and despite the fact that this is material has been covered before I was still anxious to read this, the synopsis of course was intriguing but this one had me really exited to read and I was thrilled when NetGalley approved me for it. The novel’s strength lies in its realistic character portrayals and in its lyrical description of the sights, sounds, smells, squalor, and poverty of 17th century England. Superstition, fear, Puritan fervor, lies, petty jealousies, and betrayal coalesce to scapegoat destitute women living on the fringes of society. The tension gradually builds up as layer upon layer of “evidence” against the women accumulates until the unthinkable happens.For decades, these events were the stuff of folklore and horror movies, while serious historical studies focused on religious conflicts and “mass hysteria” as motivations for the judicial murder of thousands of women. More recently, Marxist feminist historians have begun to place the witch trials at the centre of accounts of early capital accumulation. Silvia Federici argues convincingly that witch hunts were not a relic of medieval superstition, which was gradually superseded by Enlightenment rationalism. Rather, they were a product of modernisation, being rooted in the disintegration of the peasant community, already suffering from the enclosure of the land, punitive taxation and incarceration in workhouses. The Ascension By John Constable RA (1776–1837)". Dedham and Ardleigh Parishes . Retrieved 23 July 2023. The ghost of Matthew Hopkins, in full 17th century costume, is said to haunt Mistley Pond. This could very well be more colourful, local legend, but ghosts are sometimes said to haunt lakes, pools and rivers, suggesting that water acts as a portal between the living and the dead.

Trees like these hold a double meaning in our story of the witch trials. They represent both sanctuary for those fleeing their accusers and persecution; the branch of a sturdy tree was sometimes used for hanging those found guilty. In retrospect, it’d have been pretty easy to cop an accusation, and the book highlights the cases of those who accused, a type of kill-or-be-killed of the time. It is 1643, the time of the English Civil War. In the town of Manningtree in Essex, men are scarce as the young and fit are off fighting. Rebecca West and her widowed mother are among the women who live on the margins of society, looked down on by the respectable matrons of the town for the crimes of being poor and husbandless. But when Matthew Hopkins arrives in town bringing his Puritanical ideas regarding witches, suddenly these women are seen as a threat – the cause of any ill which may befall one of the town’s worthy residents. And when Matthew Hopkins decides to style himself Witchfinder, the women find themselves in danger… The following is excerpted from A.K. Blakemore’s new novel, The Manningtree Witches , which follows the residents of a small English town in the grip of the seventeenth-century witch trials. Blakemore is the author of two poetry collections: Humbert Summer and Fondue , which was awarded the 2019 Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. She has also translated the work of Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The London Review of Books , Poetry , Poetry Review , and The White Review .

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The author is a poet and the language in the book is superbly and lyrically crafted – studded with quite beautiful writing, I have started and ended my review with two examples, but there are many more phrases ( “the grass a hard enameled green in the low rays of sunshine, already a crust of young moon visible over the treetops”)

In reading historical fiction, which for you is the most important factor: the facts or the fiction, and why?How would you describe the other key characters of the community? What are their relationships to each other, and how do these help to drive the story?

The novel is superbly written, atmospheric and with the feel of dread and helplessness. The language is not easy to follow but it definitely adds to the authenticity of the period. The characters feel natural and not modern as is often the case with historical fiction. Descriptions of Essex are poetic and it does not surprise as the author is a poet and this is her debut novel. And a remarkable debut! Why has AK Blakemore chosen to write the other characters in the third-person? What effect does this have on our relationship to them? This novel is a fictionalised account of the witch trials that took place in Essex between 1645 and 1647. They resulted in the execution of between 100 and 300 mainly old, poor women. The story is told from the perspective of one of the accused, nineteen year old Rebecca West. It is punctuated with excerpts from the trial itself, a constant reminder that it was real women who were tortured and judicially murdered. Which brings me to the fact that first person narration is a bit of an odd choice for historical fiction. In particular, when the author tries to include manners of speech and vocabulary from the 17th century in dialogues and text. It just disconnects the reader from the story and the characters. A weird mix of first and third person narrative was also used in parts where our MC wasn’t present and that’s just odd overall. As he wrote in his book, The Discovery of Witches, published in 1647, Hopkins reported to the Judges of the Assize Court that a cabal of “witches” met regularly close to his house making sacrifices to the Devil (although he does not specify what this entailed). He reported that he had overheard one of the women instruct her “imp” – a demon in animal form – to fetch another witch. This woman, he said, was then seized, stripped naked and searched for marks of the Devil.

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Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,’ historical fiction about Kepler’s mother, is Galchen’s first novel since 2008’s ‘Atmospheric Disturbances.’ The Manningtree Witches inhabit a world in which centuries of custom and tradition are being violently ruptured by revolution and civil war. It is a world in which social reproduction is being restructured and women disciplined and disempowered. Witch hunting was not the only response to this crisis. In urban centres like London, women played an active role in the English Revolution, petitioning parliament and organising for wider participatory democracy. Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne were respected activists in the Leveller Movement. In rural Essex, however, women were not able to organise collectively for social change. They were the victims of crises which exacerbated prejudices and ambitions and over which they had no control. This brilliant novel is a great read and an important reminder that capitalism came into existence dripping with blood from every pore. Some of that blood belonged to thousands of poor, marginalised women who were accused of witchcraft and murdered by the state. That tolerance was lost when King James I, a staunch Catholic and vehement critic of the Occult, ascended the English throne in 1603. Within a year, he had sponsored yet another in a succession of British laws aimed at suppressing perceived anti-Christian acts. The Witchcraft Statute of 1604 ruled that “witchcraft” was a crime punishable by death. More significantly, it prescribed that guilt in such cases was no longer to be decided by the ecclesiastical courts but by the courts of the common law. While this change in jurisdiction afforded the accused some semblance of a trial before punishment, the burden of proof was lower. Witnesses could be called against the accused where the only evidence was hearsay. To my mind, Le Guin’s dazzling Earthsea Quartet ought to hold the place in our cultural esteem that Harry Potter and the etc does. We meet Tenar in the second book of the series, The Tombs of Atuan, when she is taken to serve as a child priestess to the mysterious Nameless Ones. But it is in Tehanu – older, wiser, and desperate to protect Therru, a child who has fallen under her guardianship – that she comes into her own. As a semi-literate middle-aged woman, Tenar is far from the typical fantasy heroine. But her fearlessness and grit as she works to build a life for the child she loves is as thrilling as any of Sparrowhawk’s dragon battles. Most daringly, on Le Guin’s part, Tenar’s perspective serves to interrogate the sexual politics of the earlier Quartet , and the fantasy genre in general.