This is a (Halloween special!) bonus episode that explores the image of Witches in Art, as told by Professor Lyndal Roper!

What is a witch? Where does it stem from? Why is she so often an old woman, who is harmful and evil? How did this perpetuate the way women were treated in history? What is a witch today?

Roper, a regius professor of History at the University Oxford, is one of the global experts on the history of witchcraft.

She is the author of:

Witch Craze, that examines in-depth the trials of women accused of witchcraft, and argued that the craze sprang from a collective fantasy, of which many were older, infertile women who were accused of harming infants and destroying fertility in the natural and human world: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300119831/

The Witch in the Western Imagination, which looks at the many different visualisations of witches, which in Germany found its “fullest exploration” thanks to the invention in the late 15th century, which in a way, changed the distribution of art forever: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4260/

And many more!

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/

https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:

Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel

Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic

Music by Ben Wetherfield