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- [00:01]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors. To get all History Hit Podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe and you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click. Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from and Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Throughout history and across nearly every culture, the practice of magic has flourished as a solution to find the lost, to heal the sick, and to strengthen the needy. In medieval and early modern England, this service magic was the domain of the cunning folk, whose charms, filters and spells offered solutions to everyday problems. It was, for example, a cunning woman who stood at the bedside of the ill. Fernando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby in 1590, and to whom a woman called Mabel Gray sought help to find lost valuables. In 1637, for the cost of 10 shillings and two new shirts, a cunning man sold one Jane Crosby, a charm to ensure her husband would show her love and kindness for the period of one year. The charm, which worked right up until she failed to renew it. Established long before the time of the infamous witch trials, practitioners of everyday magic were woven into the fabric of medieval and early modern life. Men and women who could be approached for personal advancement to aid fertility, predict the future, even to exact revenge. My guest today is Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, historian of medieval and early modern English magic and witchcraft. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhuge funded Seven County Witch Hunt project at the University of Exeter, examining the individuals and communities affected by the English witch trials of the 1640s. Her new book, Cunning Life in the Era of Practical Magic, navigates the social and political lives of these lesser known magical practitioners. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors. Dr. Stan Moore. Tabitha, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:53]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Hello. Thank you for having me.
- [02:55]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I'm really delighted that we have a chance to talk about this. This is one of the things that people ask me about the most whenever I talk about witchcraft, which is about the role of cunning folk or white witches or however they sort of conceive of practical magic. So perhaps we can start by thinking about definitions. How would we define the cunning folk and what was their role in late medieval and early modern England?
- [03:18]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, and I'm absolutely delighted to hear that people are asking you that question, because I think it's something that, as you said in your introduction, has been overlooked a lot in our history, because it's much more exciting to look at the witch trials and this persecution and this very dark history that we possess. And the idea that there's another sort of more humble and happy aspect of our magical history does tend to get overlooked quite a lot. So the definition of a witch or a cunning person is complicated and obviously it varies over time, but very broadly, I think it's fair to say that somebody who was living in early modern England would hear the word witch and they would think of somebody who's very scary. They'd think of somebody who potentially worked with demons and was doing maleficium, harmful magic. Whereas a cunning person who could also be called a wise woman or a wise man, a wizard, a sorceress, an enchanter, they would often be seen as doing positive, practical, useful magic, often working with God or angels, potentially fairies, sometimes demons, but always using their magic towards a practical and useful end. So very, very different to a witch.
- [04:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And you alluded to it there. But what is that relationship, then, between magic and the supernatural and religion?
- [04:37]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
That is a massive can of worms.
- [04:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Open it for us.
- [04:41]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
So I think at its heart, we need to bear in mind that religion deals with supernatural forces. And in the medieval, early modern periods, we're living in a world where most people accept that the supernatural exists in the form of God, who is a being who literally transcends nature, as well as demons and, as I say, the kind of the beings in between. So a part of being a good Christian would be to believe in supernatural activities and supernatural beings. And magic plays into that idea very, very strongly. And I think ultimately magic is the desire to take those supernatural forces and use them towards an end that benefits us. So, yeah, they were very, very much tied in together. And so a priest, for example, would be performing supernatural miracles, like, for example, taking the bread and wine, normal bread and wine, and turning that into the body and blood of Christ. That is a miracle that is transcending the boundaries of what we understand nature to be able to do. And magic does the same thing. It takes something which should be relatively normal, like wanting to get somebody better, and then using some kind of supernatural, almost miraculous power to make that happen in a way that nature shouldn't normally intend. So, yeah, they're very, very tied up in people's minds.
- [05:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And you've collated an enormous amount of evidence from trial records that looks at common magical practice. What were some of the main reasons that people would seek the help of cunning folk.
- [06:08]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, I think I've got a database, about 550 cases over a 300 year period, which for what I'm looking at is actually quite a lot. And the things that people would mostly require magic for were things that I think we can probably sympathize with today. So healing was probably one of the most common things that magic was used for, as was telling the future or divination. After that we get into slightly more unexpected things, like treasure hunting was a thing that magic was used for a lot. Just being able to identify where treasure might be buried. Across the English landscape. Love magic was always in demand. And also finding lost and stolen objects as well, because this is a period before we have insurance where everything is basically handmade. So if something goes missing, there isn't much opportunity for redress or many opportunities to sort of get a new item. So using magic to find out where it's gone is probably your best option.
- [07:04]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And can you give us some idea of how this was practiced? What were the rituals or the remedies that were being used and how did they change over time?
- [07:14]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Perhaps there's a huge range. They often have an underlying logic there which can be shared across lots of different magical practices. One of the strongest ones is the idea of sympathy magic, which is forming a sympathetic link between the person casting the spell and the intended outcome. So whether that's. If, for example, you're using for love magic, then you form a sympathetic link between yourself and your intended lover and use some kind of attraction magic to draw them to you. So that could be anything from making bread that you've put some of your essence in and feeding it to that person, or even creating dolls that represent both parties and putting magnets inside them to kind of draw the two together. So there's often a logic there. The methods used do change over time according to how people understood the magic to work in their own personal area. The fact that often this magic is via word of mout. So it's always going to change in the telling and be adapted according to whether or not something works, which I think is absolutely delightful because it's a type of folklore. Ultimately, despite this clear logic coming through a lot of the time.
- [08:20]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And are the tools that we need to imagine cunning folk using?
- [08:26]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, there are some. They may not be the ones that people have in their minds when you ask that question. So, for example, magic wands don't feature very strongly at all, but everyday household items definitely do. So so one very common divination method was to take a sieve and a pair of shears or a pair of scissors and balance the sieve on top of the shears and then ask yes or no questions, basically, and then see which way the shears tilt to sort of work out whether it's a yes or no. And I think this was a really popular method because these were items that everybody would own, so it was very easy to practice this magic in your own home. Other items were more obviously magical. So, for example, Bibles and Psalters, psalm books turn up a lot in magic because they're imbued with the supernatural power already, and so people adapt that power according to what they want to do.
- [09:19]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And have you found in your cases the use of prayers as what we might call spells?
- [09:29]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, often, yeah. Bear in mind, again, this is an incredibly Christian society. A lot of people unquestioningly accepted the God exists. And again, so therefore, you might be wanting to use these powers to sort out an everyday problem that you have. So prayers do feature a lot. They feature a lot in healing, they feature a lot in finding a thief, especially because God is somebody who is very just, and therefore if you've been wronged, then presumably God will be on your side. So invoking him in a spell to restore cosmic justice makes a lot of sense. And this is something that the Church really struggled with because they weren't always sure whether something was magical and therefore something they should condemn or something which was actually completely acceptable religion and a good practice. And that's one of the reasons I have so many cases to draw on, is because the Church was often investigating whether or not somebody was being a good Christian or being a superstitious Christian. And. Yeah, so from the. Well, from the 12th century onwards, you see the Church trying to work this out and almost using people as test cases to work out what's acceptable and what's not.
- [10:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Was it possible to make a career out of being a magical practitioner?
- [10:46]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, it was. I think most cunning folk didn't, because we often have them recorded as having another occupation as well. It could be something like, you know, they are a farm labourer, or in some cases they could be a tailor or even a priest. But if you were particularly good at the spells that you could offer, then some people make their livings out of it. So there's a woman in the 1530s who says that, in fact, she does get her entire living by the magic that she sells. And there's a man called William Wycherley who very proudly confesses in the 1540s that he has been practicing magic for 20 years. And even though technically he's a tailor, actually where he's getting all of his money from, where he's got his fame from, is from magical practice.
- [11:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Couple of questions that are coming from that. One, is there a connection between magic and midwifery? And two, you've given us several different names there. It seems that you're talking about both men and women acting as cunning folk. We have in our heads that in England, at least, women primarily were accused of being witches. So where does gender come into this? Midwifery and gender, please.
- [11:55]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, excellent points. Gender definitely features. It doesn't feature as strongly as one might expect. This is actually why I got interested in this topic in the first place, because I was interested in the gender divisions in witchcraft persecution in England, and I thought I'd actually start looking at it from the perspective of male witches. And when we do find men being prosecuted of witchcraft in England, why was that? How was that happening? So I started collecting these cases of men practicing magic, and I realized that I wasn't actually looking at which trials and I wasn't looking at which persecutions. I was looking at this practical magic instead. So then I realized that, you know, there's something in that. So I expanded my search to look at magical practitioners who were women as well. And I discovered that it was something that both men and women were practicing in roughly equal numbers. So very different to witchcraft suspicions. If you're a cunning person, you could be male or female. And I think it's literally 48% male, 52% female, or something so very close to equal. Where gender seems to come into it is the kind of magic that was practiced. You mentioned midwives. Midwives did incorporate spells into their practice. They're often not known as cunning women who also deliver babies. They're very much women who are trusted to deliver babies. And also when things get really tough in the birthing room, then they draw on magic spells to help them. So that's definitely there. And it's something that concerns physicians later into the 16th and 17th centuries. But because they see it as superstition, not necessarily because they see it as witchcraft, which I think is quite a common misnomer. Men practicing cunning magic would often have a potentially higher status. So they could be, as I mentioned, priests, they could be university graduates, and they would have access to occult knowledge that most people wouldn't be able to possess, partly because they had training in Latin, which was obviously very rare at the time. And they also had knowledge of how to be in touch with the divine in some way. So exorcising demons, for example, was something that if you did any kind of priestly training or you went to university for a while, you might learn. And if you know how to exorcise a demon, you know how to summon a demon. So a lot of the time when you see men, for example, doing treasure hunting, they're using their knowledge of exorcisms to summon a demon or a ghost or a fairy to them to answer a question about where treasure is buried. So that becomes a very masculine practice because of this access knowledge you need to have in order to get there.
- [14:38]
Don Wildman
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- [15:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
The question I'm always asked is, can one map accusations of witchcraft onto the stories of female cunning folk?
- [15:37]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
You can. It's not a straightforward story. So as I mentioned, I've got about 550 cases of practical magic use. Fewer than 10 of those were accused of witchcraft and even fewer of those actually were convicted of witchcraft. So it isn't an obvious correlation in people's minds back then that if you can practice good magic, then you can practice bad. It is something that the Church and the state under Elizabeth I and under James I tries to emphasize that there is a connection between these two types of people. But it's largely rejected at a local level because cunning folk are useful and people don't want to get rid of somebody who's being very useful. The Church always had a fairly consistent line saying that if you're doing magic and you're clearly not a saint, then you will be using demons to do it. This is something that again, largely gets ignored on a kind of common level. But we see that in plays from about 1580 onwards. There's a strong confusion being put out there that somebody who's a cunning woman must also be a witch. And you actually see characters in plays like Mother Bombay The Wise Woman of Hoxton. Even in a Comedy of Errors, where a magical practitioner will appear on the stage and then the characters will say, oh, are you a witch? And literally ask the cunning woman whether she's a witch. And the woman will say, no, thank you very much. I'm a cunning, cunning woman and I only do good. And so you see this argument happening that's presumably happening in society at the same time. What's really interesting is that by the end of most of these plays, the characters agree that the woman is a good woman and is doing good, even if she looks witchy. It's normally the baddies in the play who see her as a witch. So it seems that even at this time, which is very much the height of the witch trials, most of society still sees a distinction here, and they very strongly argue that cunning folk are the good people.
- [17:36]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So that's really interesting and starts to answer my next question, which is how were these practitioners viewed in society? And do we see this changing over time?
- [17:48]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, the way they're viewed in society is complicated. And of course, it's not as though everybody has a consistent view. I mean, nobody has a consistent view. Society's never been consistent. But I think broadly it's fair to say that if somebody is using magic to do good, then they are seen as probably good people. There is also a constant underlying concern that these are people who have access to magical powers that most people don't, and that always causes a certain level of paranoia. The Church is, as I say, very consistent about the fact that cunning folk are probably using demons, although, again, that does get muddy when they're using prayers. And there is an effort by most people who are consulting a magical practitioner to hide what they're doing because they don't want to be criticized for it or mocked for it. So I started thinking of cunning folk as a kind of a group that's living in that liminal space between acceptable and helpful and problematic and harmful. So almost like. Well, actually, they inhabit a very similar space to lawyers in the early modern period because they're dealing with all sorts of esoteric knowledge that most people don't understand and you don't fully understand how they get there. But they do normally come to an outcome which, if you get it wrong, can cost you dearly. So they've got that sort of. That slightly edgy reputation. But as I say, that doesn't stop people from using them. And even while people are mocking their abilities, they're still sort of in high demand. There is another aspect to this, which is that cunning folk are dealing with powers which are invisible, which means that there is a strong potential for fraud to be committed and for sort of fake magicians, charlatans, to sort of be wandering around the English countryside as well. And that is something that potential clients of cunning folk were very aware of. And so they were very careful about who they chose to practice magic for them. They would often rely on word of mouth. Somebody who'd use a cunning person before and said, oh, yes, actually, Mabel is very reliable. Or they would withhold part of the payment that they would give to a cunning person until after the magic had worked in order to sort of have that redress. And even sometimes a client who had been failed by a cunning person might sue to be able to get their feedback. So they were very careful. They were very aware of the fact that there was fraud happening and nobody was sort of being a fool in this situation, even though some people did occasionally take advantage of people's beliefs.
- [20:10]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Does that mean then that we have trial records of practitioners being charged with fraud?
- [20:15]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, yes, we do. Quite a few of them, actually. Bear in mind that when it comes to historical sources, we often have records when something's gone wrong. So we don't have many diary entries of somebody saying, oh, I went to my local cunning man, and it was really useful. The outcome was good. We mostly have records of going to a local cunning man and it not working for whatever reason either because the cunning man named the wrong thief, for example. So then we have a record of a slander case as a result of that, or as you say, the magic not working, and therefore a cunning man or a cunning woman being prosecuted for sort of failing to deliver on the goods. So there's an example from the 1520s, I think it's a man called Mr. Oliver who sues a cunning man because he fails to say who had set fire to Mr. Oliver's house. And the cunning person had charged a lot of money to identify the arsonist. Apparently it was £2, which is just an enormous amount. And then the cunning man said, oh, actually, I don't know, I can't tell you. And so Mr. Oliver goes to the local courts and says, you know, I want my money back. And Oliver has to return it eventually gets his money back because the cunning man is seen to be a fraud.
- [21:30]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And did cunning folk specialize in a particular field? I mean, healing, for example, or that's the person for the retrieval of lost objects?
- [21:39]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yeah, they seem to a lot of the time. I think it depends Quite a lot on levels of education, how long they've been doing it, that kind of thing. So cunning folk is a very broad term for a lot of different magical activity that was going on. But, yeah, there were a lot of women who were known as cattle charmers, for example, so they would just heal cows, essentially. That would be their job. And so they'd have one very, very good spell for that, and that was all they would offer. There's also some people who seem to have one very good charm for curing children's diseases or getting rid of worms or something like that, and that would be what they did. There are also people who clearly went beyond that. Either they understood the theory behind certain spells better than others, or because they had been to university and had lots of access to magic books with a much wider repertoire of everything from being able to create an enormous illusion of a castle, for example, just to sort of impress your friends, to being able to heal, to being able to tell the future. So it very much depends on who you're talking about, but, yeah, all the way from specialist to kind of jack of all trades.
- [22:45]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So, interesting. And I suppose I've been thinking about this as cunning folk being employed by ordinary people, but. But do we see them being turned to by members of the elites, by royals, and did their practices differ according to the status of their client?
- [23:03]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
From my research, it seems like every social stratum was using magic in medieval and early modern England. In the period I cover, which is roughly 1350 to 1650, there's, I think, about 10 monarchs, and all of them were tied up in magic use at some point, either because they were accused of using it to maintain. Maintain their power, or because they thought that they were being targeted by somebody else who was using magic. And surprisingly, actually, the uses of magic are pretty consistent among the aristocracy as much as they are among common people. You obviously don't get Henry VIII asking personally for his cows to be charmed, but you probably are going to find people in his court looking for fertility magic or attraction. Magic to, you know, of secure a good marriage or telling the future is something that everybody wanted, and especially in a place as cutthroat as the court, knowing how long the king was going to be on the throne and knowing who was going to succeed him, very, very important. So the demands are strikingly similar, despite the stakes being quite a lot higher in the demands themselves. The kinds of magic that were practiced at the court are slightly different, basically, because the aristocracy, we had a fair amount of money and we were able to employ more highly trained magical practitioners, the ones who had been to university and knew several different languages, understood astronomy and astrology really well, and were able to bring those powers to bear in the spells that they sold. It's much more complex magic they were offering and therefore they were able to charge more and also probably look more impressive with it.
- [24:46]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And there's a sense that at court or amongst those elites, if they were using magic to achieve a marriage, for example, then that could be something that was very much concerned with raising their personal status or gaining control or influence at the court. So magic potentially could be one method for navigating through the Tudor court.
- [25:13]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Absolutely. And I think it was something which was very much in demand and we probably don't see as much evidence of it as we might expect. Expect, because it was largely, I think, overlooked, unless it was seen to cause some kind of harm or some kind of threat to the royal family. But, yeah, it's definitely something that you could use to improve your status. And we do see that coming through in quite a few cases. So there's a man called Henry Neville, who was the third Baron of Westmoreland, I believe, and he employed a cunning man to help him get rich because he'd overspent mostly by gambling and trying to impress all of his men, noble friends. But when that failed, he then decided that he was going to try to be more impressive by summoning the pagan God Orpheus and using his powers to make him better at playing the lute, so that he could just get more attention when he was at the court.
- [26:08]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And we know that Elizabeth had her own personal astrologer. And John Dee, what's the role of divination more generally when it comes to this sort of magic?
- [26:20]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
As I said, I think it's one of the most important types of magic that is out there in this period and even in the modern day. And it was something that, as you say, Elizabeth I used. She commissioned a horoscope to see how successful her reign was going to be around the time of her coronation, trying to check whether the coronation day itself would be an auspicious day or not. But it was also seen as a threat as well. For example, from, I think, Henry IV's reign onwards, it was illegal to cast a horoscope to predict the death of the monarch, because that was seen as tantamount to an assassination attempt, or at least opening the door for political manoeuvrings to happen, to work out how to unseat the monarch, or when you start jostling for position for the next monarch to come in. So, yeah, it was seen as very useful if you were in control of it and very dangerous if the monarch wasn't in control of the narrative. So, very carefully, police.
- [27:10]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Given that these centuries are ones of religious and political turbulence, how much were cunning folk vulnerable to persecution?
- [27:22]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
It's difficult to say because there are so many of them that we will never know about. But I think it's fair to say that they were often in danger of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, Eleanor Cobham, who was the wife of Duke of Gloucester and therefore the cousin of Henry vi, was prosecuted for apparently trying to use magicians to predict the death of Henry VI and even potentially hurry that death along. She was arrested alongside a cunning woman called Marjorie Geormaine, as well as two astrologers who were both. Well, one was actually the chair of Cambridge University at the time and they were accused altogether for admitting treason. But Eleanor did try to defend Marjorie Geormain to begin with, saying that actually, no, Marjorie was a cunning woman who wasn't trying to bring about the death of Henry vi. Instead she was trying to cast a fertility spell to help Elena conceive a child. And this argument didn't fly. Ultimately, it was seen to be a sort of a cover up in order to sort of justify what magic was being used and the very harmful magic it was being the sort of very harmful outcome that the magic was intended to do. It's interesting because Elena survived. She was condemned for practicing magic and attempting the King's death, but she was given penance and she was forcibly divorced from the Duke of Gloucester and then spent the rest of her life in isolation. Marjorie, George Main was burned. She was actually burned for heresy, interestingly, instead of witchcraft, because witches were hanged, not burned, in England, but she ultimately, she was the one who ended up suffering as a result of her mistress's activities. So it could be very, very dangerous to be a cunning person on occasion, especially if you were dealing with high politics. If you're doing less controversial magic, you're probably much less likely to be in the firing line because, you know, the state doesn't really care as long as it's not causing any serious problems. So, yeah, it depends on the situation. But yeah, it could be very, very dangerous to be a cunning person.
- [29:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And if cunning folk were not witches themselves, were they involved in unwitching? I know George Gifford's 1593 dialogue concerning witches and witchcraft says that they're not able to counter witchcraft, but do we Find examples of people turning to the cunning folk in the hope of trying to rid themselves of bewitchment?
- [29:52]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Yes, very much so. Cunning folk actually, I was actually playing with some statistics recently to work this out. During the period of the witch trials, we actually see cunning folk expanding the repertoire and getting more business as a result of the witch trials. Because they were the go to option if you believe yourself to be cursed. A person who suddenly starts exhibiting strange symptoms like having seizures and visions and suspecting that they basically had been cursed. There were lots of ways to check whether or not this was the case. One was to consult a local priest. Another was to take a bit of the hair of the suspected witch and burn it. And if that sort of caused the suspect discomfort, then that probably meant that they were in fact the causer of curse. But another way was to go and ask your local cunning person. And cunning people actually became part of the witch finding group. We see in a lot of pamphlets, for example, about famous witch trials like the Witches of Northamptonshire or the Strange Discovery of Witches in Northamptonshire. It's a slightly different pamphlet, describes a cunning person being consulted in order to identify who the witch was and also get advice on how to stop the curse from hurting these, these cursed children. So cunning folk very much style themselves as on the side of good and able to stop the dark magic in its tracks, as you say. People like George Gifford completely disagreed with this thought that cunning folk were not capable of doing these things at all. And in fact either were knowingly dragging people away from God using their sort of their fake magic, or they were unknowingly, even worse than witches because they were again sort of making in powers other than God's own sort of mercy. So yeah, it's really interesting because I think especially nowadays we have this stereotype of good witches being prosecuted as bad witches because of this fear that the church has, when actually it's very, very different. It's actually that good witches were seen as an opposing force to the bad witches among normal people most of the time.
- [31:54]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Rather like the story of the Benedanti that Carlo Ginsburg wrote about in Italy, where they're going out to fight against the witches at nighttime. With the witch trials though, and this atmosphere around Mag into the 17th century finally, then do we see the end of practical magic as it had been, or is it impossible to chart an end?
- [32:16]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
I don't think magic ever really went away. We've got this lovely narrative of the Enlightenment hitting, then all of a sudden everybody becoming scientific and rational. The more we look into everyday interactions, the more we realize that's just funny, just not true. I do think that the nature of magic changed. Obviously the law courts become less interested in prosecuting magic and especially sort of seeing harmful magic as something that the law needs to get involved in from sort of later 17th century onwards. But on an everyday level, people still turn to magic for the same purposes that they ever did, love, fortune telling, healing, etc. And there's a lovely book. Well, lovely is probably not the right word. A very dark but very interesting book by Thomas Waters called Cursed Britain, which discusses this continuity of magical belief from the sort of the end of the witch trials into the 20th century. And that focuses largely on the fear of witchcraft and the continuity of that sort of fear. But we see survival of magical practices like women who would bless children to take away their toothache and that kind of thing surviving all the way up until the 1950s. And if we go on TikTok now, then you can still see a lot of magic spells being circulated. So I think we've got a pretty strong continuity of belief, even if the official stance changes.
- [33:37]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So there we have it. Cunning Focus. Still with us today, Dr. Tabitha Stammel. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about them.
- [33:45]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Thank you very much for having me. I've had a great time.
- [33:48]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, and also to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. Don't forget, there are hours of fascinating episodes on magic and witchcraft to revisit in our Not Just the Tudors archive, including recent episodes this month on the Basque witch Hunt with Dr. Jan Michelson and the Witchfinder General with Professor Malcolm Gaskell. The links are in the show Notes for this episode. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at notjustthetudorshistoryhip.com or on X, formerly Twitter otjusttutors. Remember, you can also listen to all of these podcasts on YouTube and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe it is well worth it. And as a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the Code Tudors at checkout. That's historyhit.com subscribe with the code Tudors and if you'd be so good as to follow Not Just the Tudors wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [35:08]
Don Wildman
As a healthcare professional treating adult patients with bcg, unresponsive, non muscle invasive bladder cancer, carcinoma in situ or nmibccis, I consider Inktiva an important treatment option. This immunotherapy harnesses the body's natural immune response and works alongside bacillus calmac, guerin or bcg. It's a non surgical option that's been shown to produce durable, complete responses up to four years for some patients, enabling them to avoid or postpone surgical removal of the bladder. Delaying cystectomy for treatment with AN could lead to development of muscle invasive or metastatic bladder cancer, which can be lethal if patients do not achieve a complete response. After a second induction course of Activa plus bcg. Reconsider cystectomy because Anktiva may cause fetal harm. Advise women to use effective contraception. The most common adverse reactions include laboratory test abnormalities, increased creatinine, dysuria, hematuria, urinary frequency, micturacean urgency, urinary tract infection, increased potassium, musculoskeletal pain, chills and pyrexia. For complete safety information, please see the full prescribing information@www.entiva.com. do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs?
- [36:14]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Our podcast Hungry for History is back, and this season we're taking an even bigger bite out of the.
- [36:22]
Don Wildman
Most delicious food and its history, seeing.
- [36:25]
Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
That the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba and the pina colada from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for history on the.
- [36:33]
Don Wildman
Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.