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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.
- [00:20]
Professor Ronald Hutton
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- [00:37]
Professor Ronald Hutton
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- [01:25]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn 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. The persecution of witches during the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe was especially intense, but belief in the idea of witches long predated those trials and has been a global phenomenon. So how can worldwide parallels offer a context for the better comprehension of the early modern witch? What insights can an early modern historian draw from anthropology, from folklore and ancient history to put the 16th and 17th century witch trials in context? From what stuff was the idea of the witch in early modern Europe constructed? These are some of the questions that Frame Professor Ronald Hutton's groundbreaking book of 2017, the A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, and which I seek to explore with him today. Ronald Hutton, professor of History at the University of Bristol, cbe, and Fellow of the British Academy, the Learned Society of Wales, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of antiquaries, has written 19 books and you last heard him on this podcast discussing his latest Brilliant installment of his biography of Oliver Cromwell. But he's also a leading expert on British folklore, modern paganism, druidry, shamanism and witchcraft. And no series on witches would have been complete without him. Listen on to understand how the figure of the witch became so potent in early modern Europe. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors. Professor Hutton, it's always a joy to speak to you and I'm particularly looking forward to our conversation today. Thank you for coming back.
- [03:38]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's lovely to be working with you again.
- [03:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Suzanne, may we start with thinking about a definition of the word witch? What should we understand a witch to be?
- [03:49]
Professor Ronald Hutton
The problem with that is that there are four different definitions of a witch circulating in the world today and they're all equally valid. Two of them are really old indeed, they're early medieval. One is that a witch is somebody who uses magic to harm other humans. The other is that a witch is somebody who uses magic for any purpose, including helping and healing people. Although that sort of witch is usually distinguished by an added term like a white witch or a good witch. The two modern definitions which have been around since the 19th century and are equally valid are that a witch is a feminist like and a feisty woman who's persecuted by the men around her to keep women in general down, and that a witch is a practitioner of a surviving pagan religion of feminism and nature worship. The definition which is most relevant to the witch trials is clearly the first and the nastiest, which is a witch is somebody who uses magic to harm other humans.
- [05:02]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And as you say in your book, immediately that begs the question of what magic is. And it might be worth saying what it is, because we all think we know. But actually it's quite good to clarify.
- [05:13]
Professor Ronald Hutton
I think I define magic here as the believed art or craft of particular humans to manipulate arcane, superhuman forces in order to achieve physical change.
- [05:32]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That's very helpful as we think on about some of the ways that you've explored the wider context of witchcraft in order to zero in on those couple of centuries, or actually, as we'll see, about 80 years of intense persecution. And one of the decisions you've made is to turn to look towards anthropology. Obviously, classically this had been done by people like Evans Pritchard in the past. What do you conclude from looking at anthropology about the characteristics of witches? Is there anything universal that can be said?
- [06:07]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yeah, there certainly is. The first thing is that human beings traditionally have real trouble coping with uncanny misfortune. They can't really handle the idea of sheer bad luck. There always has to be a reason for people being seriously unlucky. And there are actually three reasons that humans across the world have provided. One is angry nature spirits, the beings that we would call fairies. The second is angry ancestral spirits, ghosts. The third is nasty living human beings and the majority of societies in every inhabited continent of the globe have unhappily gone for the third of those options and blamed their neighbors. And there's a fairly consistent image of what the witch is in every inhabited continent. First, a witch is somebody who manipulates magic in order to harm others. Second, this person is a member of your own community, not an enemy agent working against your people. Third, they work in secret while pretending to be nice to you. Fourth, they operate in a tradition. In other words, they're not one offs. They learn how to do this by inheriting the powers from their own family, or by learning them, and sometimes by allying with evil spirits in the natural world. The final characteristic is the belief that these evil people can be resisted by forcing them to recall their spell, or by buying them off, or by eliminating them physically. And that's how would Trump start?
- [08:00]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And these are characteristics that you've gleaned from looking at witchcraft around the world. But what is fascinating also is that you suggest that in certain ways, there's a continuous transmission of magical lore from the ancient world, from the ancient Eastern Europe, Mediterranean, even ancient Egypt, through to early modern Europe. Where can we see that?
- [08:25]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Well, there are two things going on here. The first is a fear of evil witches, which is common to a lot of societies in ancient Europe and the Near East. And second, there's a belief that it's actually okay for people to work magic. This is particularly concentrated in one ancient people, and that's the Egyptians. The Egyptians believed that magic is a neutral force through the universe. It's a technique. It's manipulated by goddesses and gods, which is why the universe functions. But it can be manipulated by talented humans. And if those humans get really good at it, then they end up being gods after death. And that's why the Egyptians had no real sense of a witch figure, the evil magicians. Instead, if you thought somebody had hexed you, you simply hexed them back or went to a local expert, usually in a temple, to do it for you. And this basic belief that magic is okay was enshrined in quite elaborate books in ancient Egypt, which then got transmitted through the medieval world and formed a continuous tradition of learned ceremonial magic coming up to the present, always outlawed by official Faiths, whether they be Christianity, Judaism or Islam. But always carrith on the quiet because of the promises that this tradition of magic seemed to make for getting whatever you wanted in life.
- [10:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And it's interesting that it gets lined up under the Romans with Christianity because it doesn't necessarily seem obvious. You write that Jesus himself was not interested in magic, that the Apostle Paul condemned it as a non lethal crime, you know, on the level with anger. So the fact that we have in our heads that this is very much a campaign maintained by the church, often that we have that incorrectly anyway. But how do we. Why did Christianity become quite so hostile towards magic?
- [10:38]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Christianity is always hostile towards magic in the sense they believe that since there's an all powerful God in charge of it thing, people who try and manipulate magical power are breaking the rules, they're usurping God's authority. They have to wait for God to charge them up with unusual arcane power and then they become saints and they can achieve miracles. But Christianity doesn't become seriously hostile to witchcraft as bad magic for about a thousand years after it takes real power in most of Europe for most of that time, it's worried as the Bible is about demons and it believes that demons can give people horrid powers, but it goes for the demons rather than the people. So across most of Europe there are penalties for using magic to hurt people. But the magic concerned is defined as individual acts of malevolence against individuals. And mostly the responsibility of proving that you've been bewitched rests with you as an individual. It's not very easy to prove a charge of magic against somebody. This changes enormously soon after the year 1400, when a new idea begins to get a grip on European intellectuals and leaders. That there is a satanic conspiracy in which God has licensed the devil to grant evil human beings real magical powers by using the talents of his demons. And this is to test the faith of the human race and to see whether it's worth saving. And the stress in that early 15th century is that this is not a traditional threat. It's something totally new. It is something which our forefathers and mothers didn't have to face. And therefore it's an emergency. And that's why the heat has turned up on people identified as evil witches. It's a slow burning fuse belief in the new stereotypes confined mainly to the Rhine valley, the Alps, northern Italy for 150 years. And then in the mid 16th century, it suddenly explodes and spreads across the whole of Europe.
- [13:14]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So I want to come back to Pick up that thread. But I'd also like to address the tenacious idea that you explore in your book, an idea that I would argue is perhaps going through a new renaissance as we speak, that witchcraft practitioners were adherents of a surviving pagan religion. What's the history of this idea and is there anything that we can glean from it that is accurate?
- [13:40]
Professor Ronald Hutton
The idea itself is wrong, but we can glean some good things from it. It begins with the enormous change in the European Enlightenment by which the people in charge of Europe convinced themselves that magic didn't exist. Now, the problem here is that if magic doesn't exist, then everybody executed as a witch in the preceding 2, 300 years had died for nothing, an enormous crime against humanity. And radicals in the 18th century did use it as a stick with which to beat the established churches and monarchies and aristocracies. So the period of reaction that follows the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of so many churches and traditional monarchies, there is an attempt made by conservatives to get round it. And the argument they come up with in Germany is that indeed, magic doesn't exist, but the people persecuted as witches were practitioners of a surviving disgusting pagan religion that did all the horrid things that witches assemblies were supposed to do, like sexual orgies, human sacrifice, worship of horrible gods. This, of course, is a great challenge to the radicals and they respond very fast, especially in France. But they don't carry out solid research to debunk the reactionary's idea. They just reverse it by saying, yes, the people executed as witches were practitioners of a surviving pagan religion, but it was a really nice one of feminism, nature worship and resistance to the tyranny of medieval aristocracies, monarchies and churches. In other words, a harbinger of a better future. And this idea spreads across Europe and North America in the rest of the 19th century. It's taken up in early 20th century Britain with particular enthusiasm, and especially by an Egyptologist called Margaret Murray. And by the mid 20th century, it's something like an orthodoxy. It's found in most of the textbooks about medieval and early modern Europe. And it falls apart in the 1970s and 1980s when consistent research begins into the actual records, the witch trials. And it's proved beyond any doubt that the people who were persecuted were not actually practitioners of the pagan religion. The things we can get out of this is that ancient pagan ideas did underpin a lot of the ideas that create the late nadir, the early modern witch trials, not because ancient pagans survived as witches, but because ancient pagans feared and persecuted people as witches.
- [16:47]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So what sort of ancient or traditional elements do we see combining then to shape the idea of the witch?
- [16:55]
Professor Ronald Hutton
One is the idea of witches as evil humans who get powerful by making deals with evil spirits, the characters the Greeks called demons. This is found right across the ancient near east, all the way from Palestine round to Babylon, Sumer and the Persian Gulf. Second idea is that there's a conspiracy of witches living in your midst to do you harm by concerting their evil actions. And this is found in ancient Rome. The pagan Romans seem to have been witch hunters on a scale even greater than that of Christian Europe. In the third and second centuries, before the Christian era ever began, the romans would execute 3,000 and then 2,000 people in separate waves of individual trials, witch hunts. And that's a body count never reached in later Europe. And the third idea is from Germany, and it is that wicked women go around at night sapping the life force out of sleeping men, removing their organs and leaving temporary fix it substitutes in their place. And they then remove these tasty bits of men to parties where they meet each other, do a lot of cackling and dancing and feast upon their stolen body parts. And that's the origin of the idea of the witches. Savvard.
- [18:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
This is all fascinating stuff, and you've pointed out that there are a thousand years in which Christianity, it doesn't appear to be driving forward witch trials and certainly never does on the scale of the Romans. Does that mean that we should be speaking of medieval tolerance towards witches?
- [18:45]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yeah, relative tolerance up to about 1400 on the whole, until 1400, when local people get worried about witches and the prehistoric and the pagan fear of witches remains among ordinary people for a long time. The church steps in to protect them if the church can. There's a classic example in Germany, quite a moving one, where local people blame some local women for problems in the neighborhood and they burn them to death. And the monks from the local monastery come out horrified at what's happened. They give the remains of the women honorary burial in their monastery and venerate them as martyrs to popular bigotry. And this sort of pattern is not unusual. You find popes and leading churchmen intervening to stop witch hunting quite regularly because they don't see the point in it. And also they have a real fear of the injustices that can be done.
- [19:58]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Is it perhaps, though also representative of the sort of evidence that survives, I mean, so much of the time? We know about the cases from the early modern period because these are trials under law. And happily for us, not happily for those involved, but happily for us, we have the materials, we have the papers that survive. I had a journalist contact me just the other day to ask about the 1324 case in Ireland and whether it was the first execution for witchcraft in Ireland and the world I had. Certainly not the world. The thing is, we can't know about lynch mobs. We can't know about popular action because it doesn't produce the sort of paperwork. I mean, this is arguing from absence of evidence, which is obviously a deeply problematic methodology. But just to pose the question to.
- [20:48]
Professor Ronald Hutton
You, well, we do have evidence of lynch mobs in the Middle Ages when the authorities get cross about them or appalled by them, because after all, ordinary people taking the law into their own hands is something that's not popular with people in charge of the law across the planet. And there are a number of cases in which the authorities are shocked and infuriated by vigilante action on the part of local people without any reference to them. So these cases are attested and sometimes in detail.
- [21:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
We're just halfway through our conversation. There is so much more to say, but we need to take a little break right now. Please stay with us.
- [21:53]
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- [24:29]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You mentioned that in the early 15th century we get this new stereotype, this new image of a witch developing in the Alps and that the fact that we've got the marrying of the idea of demons with ideas about the use of magic becomes crucial. How does that spread?
- [24:49]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It spreads very rapidly once Christianity tears itself apart. When you have a stable, unified western church covering western and central Europe, then it's easy to damp things down. But as soon as Martin Luther nails his theses to a door in Germany, the Protestant Reformation begins and a unified Christianity fragments not just between Protestant and Catholic, but between different forms of Protestantism. And after half a century in which the various different parties try and make it up, round about 1560 they shift into all out exterminating warfare. Europe's wars of religion begin Wide scale religious persecution and the religious thermometer zooms up to fever pitch. And so right across Europe certain leaders take it into their heads that the end of the world is coming, that God is really testing his true believers, and that it's up to them as people responsible for particular territories, to purge those territories of sin, to get rid of the wrong kind of Christian, to get rid of Jewish people, to get rid of gay people, to get rid of gypsies and vagrants and drunks, badly behaved traditional village festivals and to get rid of witches. As part of this package, usually witch hunting is an item on agenda of purging society of all sorts of perceived enemies and misfits. And it's rife in a time when Christianity is tearing at its own vitals and different Types of Christian are trying to annihilate the other.
- [26:50]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Although it's probably worth adding that it is absolutely that kind of apocalyptic angst that is vital. It's not so much that we see Protestants accusing Catholics of witchcraft or vice versa. Just to Clarify, also around 1560, where we see this climax of the witchcraft trials, as you put it over, actually, what's the course of a single long lifetime through to about 1640. Are there other circumstances that are producing that climax then, do you think?
- [27:18]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yeah, there certainly are. About 80% of the people executed for witchcraft in late medieval, early modern Europe die in that one 80 year period. One long lifetime, as you say. This is the nadir, the storm center of Europe's wars of religion, when different types of Christian are going all out at each other. But it's also the lowest point of a decline in weather that's been going on since about 1300 and has turned the high medieval summer into a little ice age in which people all over Europe are driven to the border of sustainability by long winters and wet summers of a kind that their ancestors didn't have. And in addition, the Turks are rolling up more and more of the Christian world by conquering huge areas of southeastern Europe. And they carry on doing so to the 1680s, and they have rolled up the southern shore of the Mediterranean right to Morocco. So a single Islamic power, the Turks, can strike at anywhere in southern Europe as well. So Western Christianity feels very much on the skids altogether. And so it's much easier to believe in a satanic crusade using witches as stormtroopers.
- [28:49]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You look at some of the fascinating regional variation that we see when it comes to the witch hunt, perhaps we could discuss a few of those, the ones that come to mind. But feel free to talk about whatever you fancy were things like the benedante and 17th century Russia and even the Finnmark witch hunt, which has been the feature of a recent novel. But I think otherwise might have been quite unknown to people.
- [29:14]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yeah, absolutely right. The cases you cite are very different in kind. The Belladante sprang to stardom with the translation in the 1980s of a 1960s book by the great Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who found in the records of the inquisitors at Venice records of a group of people in northeastern Italy who believed that as their bodies slept, their souls went out at night to fight witches to preserve the prosperity of the local farmers. In fact, as Carlo soon realized, these were just one corner of a huge regional belief in these dream warriors, particular talented people whose spirits would go out at night when they slept and do battle with evil forces to defend their communities, spreading right across the Balkans, down into Greece and up to Hungary. Carlo linked these to the Siberian figures we call shamans, Siberian term, who would send their spirits out consciously when going into trance while awake to do battle for the sake of their communities. There is a resemblance, but there are also important differences and a whole swathe of territory between the Balkans and Siberia which doesn't have either figure. So Carlo very ably and very helpfully uncovered a huge regional tradition. I don't think we can use the belladante as representative of witchcraft beliefs or indeed any beliefs in Europe as a whole. They're distinctively regional. Turning to Finmark, the honours, if that can possibly be the term of the worst witch hunters can be divided equally between Catholics, particularly in southwestern Germany, Calvinists, particularly in Scotland, and Lutherans. And they're in northern Norway, where this back end of Europe, if you go up Norway and go up to the top and then keep heading east on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, you're in Finnmark. It's the bit of Norway that's now next to Russia. And fed by ideas about witch hunting, which largely come from Scotland and through a Scottish governor, the local authorities at the top of Europe begin engaging in large scale witch hunts. These are marginal communities that mostly depend on fishing. This is a rough sea, you're particularly vulnerable to storms, and so the loss of fishing boats and crews got regularly blamed on witches. And once the authorities begin encouraging the extermination of the witches, there's potential for a really intense witch hunt. And that's what you get up there.
- [32:39]
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.
- [32:58]
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- [33:41]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
The final regional variation I wondered if we could talk about is Russia in the 17th century. Because so much of the time when we think about witches in Western Europe, we're talking largely about women. But Russia is one example that demonstrates that regional belief also speaks to gender.
- [34:03]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's the biggest example of that in Europe, so it's a good one to choose. And it's worth mentioning that across the world, gender is a variable when it comes to selecting targets as witches. In some parts of the world, witches are stereotypically female, others they're male, in some parts they're old, in some parts they're young, in some parts they're rich, in some parts they're poor. So all these are the big variables. And Europe shows the variables too. There are areas of Europe where people don't blame witches for misfortune, they blame fairies. As in Ireland, the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and in much of Wales. There are large areas of Europe where males are stereotypically witches. The Russian case is because the stereotype of the Satanic witch crusade never really gets into Russia. It's too much on the edge. And it hasn't got a Western Christianity, it's got Eastern Orthodox Christianity. And all the countries that have Orthodox Christianity don't produce big witch hunts. So it's isolated. And they're the people accused of witchcraft or in low numbers. They're individuals not involved in conspiracies of witches. And they're mostly men, because men are traditionally the magicians in Russia. If you look at other examples in Iceland, it's traditionally people who work with wounds. That's a type of writing who are the magicians. So 93% of those executed and the nasty little Iceland witch hunt are male. In Estonia, Latvia, Finland, that's an area influenced by a form of Siberian shamanism in which experts in magic are generally male and go to trance to contact the spirit world, and that's why they're targeted. But in Normandy, it's shepherds who are the magical sex. And so it's a bad place to be a shepherd in the witch hunts. And in the Austrian lands, it's vagrants who are the wicked magicians and they get picked up and executed as witches in large numbers. So that there's plenty of Europe in which the Anglo American Germanic stereotype of the witch as a female doesn't apply.
- [36:33]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You mentioned Wales there. And the same could be said for other areas of Celtic Britain. You note in your book man and Gaelic island and Scotland all resist the adoption of large scale witch hunts and in some places just don't hunt witches at all. Can we explore why that is?
- [36:51]
Professor Ronald Hutton
I suggest that it's because the Locals have other beings to blame for the kind of misfortune which is blamed upon witches in the rest of Britain and much of continental Europe. So if your child gets sick, if your geese stop laying, if your machinery breaks, if mysterious and baffling and terrible other things happen too, and you feel cursed, then you blame the fairies. They're particularly active, malevolent, in the mindset of those areas. And the parallels are very plain, as is the striking disinclination to blame people.
- [37:32]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
It's interesting because in my work on 16th century France, among the Calvinists, I have a category of people there who are receiving witchcraft accusations, but interpreting them as evidence of neighborly disputes and just insults, as opposed to anything that would produce a trial. And it's fascinating thinking about circumstances where either trials are not produced or trials don't end in executions. And one obvious thing to talk about is around the Mediterranean, because we associate the Inquisition with severity, but when it comes to witches, they're relatively mild. What's going on there?
- [38:13]
Professor Ronald Hutton
They take a while to get mild. Northern Italy, central Italy, is one of the birthplaces of the stereotype of the Satanic witch. And there are thousands of victims claimed in the Mediterranean lands up to the early 16th century. But after then, the increasingly powerful religious bodies and state bodies in charge of the health of society, notably the Spanish Inquisition, the Papal Inquisition in Italy, back off witch hunting because they become increasingly worried about the evidence, which is always so subjective, and about the social consequences, which can be traumatic, divisive and murderous. They can actually afford to do this for the most part, because they're so secure down there. They don't have other enemies to face. They've exterminated Protestants, they've expelled or imprisoned in ghettos, the local Jewish population. Population, and they control their societies very effectively. So to allow spontaneous witch hunting to break out and people to be accused of satanic witchcraft seems to them to carry a much worse promise of disruption and division than it does of healing society.
- [39:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You mentioned magicians earlier, and I wonder if we can explore the line between magic and witchcraft in 16th, 17th century England. How accepted is it that there is a distinction between the two?
- [39:55]
Professor Ronald Hutton
In theory, there's no distinction between magic and witchcraft. In practice, there's quite a big one. And the distinction is between ordinary people, especially viewed as women in England, who are seduced by the devil and agree to worship him and accept demons to do horrid things in exchange for the opportunity to get back at their neighbors and learned magicians who set out to learn formulae and manipulate cosmic Powers that can actually subdue and control demons. So although the Church would suggest that anybody who uses magic is making an implicit deal with the devil, because magic is the devil's province to most people, there is a distinction between learned magicians who are nevertheless not very respectable, but are not actually submitting to the power of Satan. They're actually trying to subdue Satan's lieutenants and make them work, as the magicians would argue, in many cases, for human good and ordinary criminals who make pacts with the devil in order to do horrid things to humanity. And that's why learned magicians are rarely in trouble. And when they are, they're hardly ever executed or submitted to other severe penalties.
- [41:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And when it comes to ordinary folk, we do have a specifically English feature of folklore that you address in your book, and I was so glad you did, because it was one of these things that had never really been tackled properly before, which is thinking about the connection between witchcraft and demonic animals, the so called familiars or imps or spirits that we don't find in continental witchcraft cases, except perhaps the toads in the Basque. What should we make of these little animals and why do they appear in England and not elsewhere?
- [41:51]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Now that's something which I wasn't able to solve. I was able to define the phenomenon a bit better than before, for by suggesting that it's not a medieval thing. It appears around the beginning of the 16th century and then it spread as witch hunting spreads, so it peaks in the early 17th century. The animals concerned are demons which have taken animal form, and they take the form mostly of household pets, which enables them to get everywhere unobserved and work evil magic, and also to hide in plain sight as a pet of the witch. So there is a kind of logic here, but why the English of all peoples should take up this idea because the Scots don't, let alone continental Europeans, is what I didn't manage to answer. I think we need to have better studies than we have at present of the relationship between the Tudor English and animals as a whole. That's a largely unexplored area. So young historians take note, there are some good PhDs in that field.
- [43:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, if you don't think you managed to solve that, you've managed to solve quite a lot of other things. So thank you very much for talking us through the outline of this extraordinarily diverse and continuous idea of witchcraft through the centuries, peaking with these dreadful witch trials in the period that we most care about. Your book is called the A History of Fear from ancient times to the present. So listeners, if your interest has been piqued, and why would it not have been, you must pick up a copy of this book to find out more. Ronald Hutton it has been, as ever, a joy. Thank you.
- [43:46]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's always a delight to work with you. Susanna.
- [43:57]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors and also to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. 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 Not Just the tutors@historyhit. Or on X. Formerly Twitter otjusttutors. Remember that you can also listen to all of these podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe it's 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 would be so good as to follow Not Just the Tudors on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [45:11]
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