Conway Hall: Where Ethics Matter

Camille Ralphs will recite the entirety of acclaimed poetry pamphlet Malkin, ‘an ellegy in 14 spels’ in the voices of those accused in the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials.

Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet, and featured on BBC Radio 6 Music’s Sunday show with Cerys Matthews. Ralphs served as 2016-17 President of Oxford University Poetry Society, won the University of Oxford’s Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize, and reviews for the TLS.

The four confessions given by Isobel Gowdie to a Scottish court, in May 1662, are seminal witchcraft texts; bringing folk belief in the faerie, the world of familiar spirits, night flight and the coven to stark prominence. This talk shows how a marginal figure, in her own day, moved towards the cultural mainstream, through the works of modern composers, rock musicians and novelist, and was comprehensively recast in the process.

Dr John Callow is an author, screenwriter and historian, specialising in Seventeenth Century politics, witchcraft, and popular culture including Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft (IB Tarsus 2017).

Whether one believes in ghosts or not, it is an easy assumption that sightings of ghosts must have been common on the First World War battlefields considering the sheer number of traumatic deaths and the intensity of individual and collective emotions. There is certainly a long tradition of the appearance of ghostly armies. So what sort of ghostly expressions of conflict might have been expected during and after the First World War?

Owen Davies is a reader in Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. His main field of research is on the history of modern and contemporary witchcraft and magic.

The dead don’t always stay peacefully in their graves. British folklore and chronicle relates from very early times instances of vampire-like and undead behaviour, spelling disaster for communities. Radical social upheaval – such as the Norman Conquest – spawns narratives about the undead; later chroniclers remark that there are so many tales of the undead it would be tedious to list them all. Recent archaeological finds seem to confirm the survival of these beliefs right up to the end of the medieval period; time-honoured ways of preventing the dead from walking again offer the best explanation for the unusual post-mortem treatment of some bodies. Nor is it just the British Isles that suffer from the plague of the walking dead; Icelandic sagas have many such tales, and some useful tips about how to settle such revenants once and for all.

Carolyne Larrington is a Tutorial Fellow in English Literature at St John’s Oxford and the author of The Land of the Green Man, Winter is Coming: the Medieval World of Game of Thrones and An Introduction to Norse Myths.

The idea that the dead can return to haunt the living is deeply rooted in the British imagination, and ghosts are central to countless plays and paintings, stories and ballads, photographs and films. But why has the appearance and behaviour of ghosts in art and literature altered over time? When did they stop wearing shrouds and put on white sheets or become see-through? And what do these changes reveal about them – and us?

Dr. Susan Owens, former Curator of Paintings at the V&A, is the author of The Ghost: A Cultural History (Tate Publishing, 2017).

Emily Cleaver recounts a recent ‘scouring’ of the Uffington White Horse, the traditional cleaning event that has kept the chalk figure from becoming overgrown since its construction in the Iron Age. Exploring the archeological evidence for the origins of the figure, plus local folklore from fertility rituals to furniture arrangement.

Emily is a writer with an interest in folklore, local traditions and history.

A discussion as to an alternative vision for education systems, institutions and people in the United Kingdom. Speakers:

David Scott, University College London, Institute of Education

Robin Street, Co-Principal of UCL Academy

Organised and Chaired by Francis Sealey (GlodbalNet21)and Prof Evan Parker (Conway Hall Ethical Society).

Michael Rosen has a new memoir, So They Call You Pisher! In this conversation with Daniel Hahn, Rosen recalls the first twenty-three years of his life.

In partnership with Newham Books.

Recorded: Thursday 16th November 2017 at Conway Hall.

Will Ashon, author of Strange Labyrinth: Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London’s Great Forest, discusses his journey out in to the edges of London.

Hosted by Scott Wood from New Lands/London Fortean Society.

Long ago a path was created by the passage of feet tramping through endless forests. Gradually that path became a track, and the track became a road. It connected the White Cliffs of Dover to the Druid groves of the Welsh island of Anglesey, across a land that was first called Albion then Britain, Mercia and eventually England and Wales. Armies from Rome arrived and straightened this 444 kilometres of meandering track, which in the Dark Ages gained the name Watling Street. Today, this ancient road goes by many different names: the A2, the A5 and the M6 Toll. It is a palimpsest that is always being rewritten.

The myriad people who use this road every day might think it unremarkable, but, as John Higgs shows, it hides its secrets in plain sight. Watling Street is not just the story of a route across our island, but an acutely observed, unexpected exploration of Britain and who we are today, told with wit and flair, and an unerring eye for the curious and surprising.

Watling Street is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Chaucer, Dickens and James Bond. Along this route Boudicca met her end, the Battle of Bosworth changed royal history, Bletchley Park code breakers cracked Nazi transmissions and Capability Brown remodelled the English landscape.

The event was hosted by Scott Wood & Conway Hall