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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
Sleep Number Customer 1
Are you really
- [00:36]
Sleep Number Customer 2
buying a car online on Autotrader right now?
- [00:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Really?
- [00:38]
Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget.
- [00:42]
Sleep Number Customer 2
You can really have it delivered or pick it up. I think kid is walking up the slide.
- [00:47]
Rachel Morris
Really?
- [00:48]
Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
Autotrader Buy your car online? Really?
- [00:51]
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- [01:05]
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- [01:07]
Sleep Number Customer 1
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- [01:09]
Carvana Customer
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- [01:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit 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. Let me take you back to the 17th century. The setting is the village of Aberfoyle in Scotland, where the lowlands give way to the Highlands, where rivers are born, pearls once lay submerged in forest streams, and old beliefs refuse to die. On a cold, misty night, a man of God steps out into the dark wearing only his nightgown. By morning he will be dead, or so the official story goes. But the people of the Glen say they know better. They say that the fairies have taken him. This is the story of Robert Kirk, a quiet minister who may have crossed a line no one else dared to cross. Kirk wasn't a sorcerer like John Dee, nor a wandering mystic. He was a clergyman, a scholar, a man who preached twice every Sunday, was seen to pray twice a day, and lived in a modest house. But while Kirk tended to souls by daylight, he spent his nights listening to farmers, shepherds and villagers who spoke in hushed voices of second sight, spirit doubles and a hidden world living just beside our own. And unlike many educated men of his time, Kirk. Kirk didn't laugh. He didn't dismiss these ideas. He wrote a book that treated fairies not as childish fantasy, but as real entities with structure, habits and even bodies described in language eerily close to Renaissance philosophy and Neoplatonic magic. Kirk seemed to be asking a dangerous question. What if the fairies of Highland folklore were the same beings philosophers had been writing about for centuries? What if myth and metaphysics were pointing to the same unseen truth? That question may have cost him everything. In 1692, Kirk collapsed near a fairy hill. Some say he was struck down by illness. Others insist. After his manuscript found its way to London as punishment for revealing their secrets, he was taken alive into the fairy commonwealth. After that, his book vanished. For over a hundred years, it was lost, until one day, by mistake, it landed in the hands of Sir Walter Scott. What followed was a trail of missing manuscripts, vanishing copies and rediscovered texts, disappearing and reappearing, as if the fairies themselves were deciding how much the world was allowed to know. Eventually, the work was published under the title the Secret Commonwealth of Elves and Fairies, and Robert Kirk was given an unforgettable name. Chaplain to the Fairy Queen. Today, we're stepping into the world of Robert Kirk, where the boundaries between religion, magic and early science were far more porous than you might expect. This was a time when angels, fairies, spirits and magic weren't pushed to the fringes by science, but lived right alongside and with it. But the mystery of Robert Kirk is only part of a much bigger story. My guest today is the historian Rachel Morris, author of the Years of the Wizard, a book that plunges us into the strange, vibrant intellectual landscape of the 17th century. This was a time of extraordinary change, when old certainties were breaking down and new ways of understanding the universe were taking shape. Yet belief in magic, spirits and unseen forces did not simply disappear. Instead, it adapted, persisted, and in some cases, flourished. Rachel Morris guides us through a world that also includes learned magicians like John Dee, early scientists like Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, village storytellers, cunning folk and ordinary people trying to explain misfortune, mystery and wonderful. Together, they reveal a past that was not simply marching towards modernity, but wrestling with it. This is a conversation about belief and doubt, enchantment and disenchantment. And why magic has never quite let go of the human imagination. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Rachel, welcome to the podcast.
- [06:03]
Rachel Morris
Thank you. And that's a great introduction and captures a lot of the magic of magic.
- [06:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for saying so. Tell me more about Robert Kirk then. Who was he and how did he attract your attention?
- [06:17]
Rachel Morris
Well, I came to him via John Dee, and I found that I was entering a series of extraordinary characters and extraordinary adventures. Each one was sort of more extraordinary than the last. But I began with John Dee, who's a bit earlier than Robert Kirk, and he was widely believed at the time to be a magician. We're in a time when there's several different kinds of magic, and there is, of course, the magic of fairies and witches and so on, but there's also a wide belief in a kind of ceremonial magic, which is very male, very bookish, quite upper class generally, and extraordinarily just widely believed in. So from John Dee, I found my way to this character and that character. And then towards the end of this period, just before the Enlightenment really kind of begins to kick in, I found the life story of Robert Kirk. And as you say, he was a quiet kind of guy, as far as we can tell, a minister of the church. He lived at a time when Scotland was in a great deal of political turmoil and had been for some time. But he himself, as far as we can tell, lived this quiet life on the edge of the Highlands. And he would have gone probably unremarked, except that he. He had this curious interest in the story of the fairies, and he wasn't interested in them in the way that you might find in 19th century folkloric stuff. He didn't tell folktales and fairy tales about them. He examined them as if they were real people. And he was interested in what they wore, how they lived, what they looked like, how long they lived. And he went at it like an anthropologist trying to identify a hidden, secret race. It is a very curious manuscript. And then the curiosities of it are doubled and tripled and so on by what happened to the manuscript and its various effects. But just the thing in itself, the manuscript is remarkable.
- [08:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And we see in his name, strangely enough, the name of the church in Scotland, Robert Kirk. How did his Christian beliefs, this man who was a minister of the church, conflict or harmonize with his fairy scholarship?
- [08:40]
Rachel Morris
Well, that's an interesting and quite tricky question because it brings you back to the subject of belief. You know, how Widespread were fairy beliefs, we think probably fairly widespread. But belief is a tricky thing. It gets stronger and weaker from day to day and year to year in anyone's lifetime. But that all that said, it seemed that Robert Kirk had a very particular way of thinking about the fairies, which didn't conflict with his Christian beliefs. Because what Robert Kirk was thinking, we think, is that if you can prove or convince people of the existence of a secret race of spirits like angels or ghosts or anything like that, then it's easier for people to believe in the greatest spirit of them all, which is God. So there was quite a push from some people, some intellectuals who are also God fearing people. There was quite a push for them to promote the idea of spirits. And then Robert Kirk's work is identifying the fairies as one of these spirit races. It takes a little bit of one's imagination to get your head around that because it is quite a different way of thinking.
- [10:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, I suppose really it's just believing in the supernatural. There is. Why confine the supernatural to the orthodox Christianity? If you believe that there is something beyond what you can see, then it could be all manner of things.
- [10:19]
Rachel Morris
Yes, and you're right. And once you accept that, then your mind is open to all kinds of things. And there was a lot of belief in, well, angels were widely believed in, likewise ghosts, all kinds of things. So in that kind of way, fairies were not that different. So for Robert Kirk there wasn't, I think, a great conflict between his Christian beliefs and his fairy beliefs.
- [10:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's look at his description of fairies then. How did he understand them? Did he see them as benign or malevolent or both?
- [10:55]
Rachel Morris
Well, probably both, I would say. But there are certainly examples in his writing in which he describes them with great politeness, with great courtesy. He talks of them as being our neighbors, that kind of thing. He was, I think, a very mild mannered, quite courteous kind of person himself. And he was willing to see them as just simply our invisible neighbors.
- [11:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
His writings include accounts of second sight. What is this phenomenon that he talks about so much?
- [11:27]
Rachel Morris
Yes, so second sight was probably several things, but one thing it certainly was was an ability to see the invisible fairies. For most of us it was accepted they are invisible, but some people, an exceptional few, can see them. And it was generally believed that there was more of this second sight up in the north of Scotland than there is down, say, in the south of England, in London and so on. So that was second sight. People who claimed to have it would recount extraordinary stories of what they believed they'd seen you get these extraordinary stories of the concept of the CO walker, the invisible spirit which walks beside every human being and accompanies them everywhere until the day the human being dies, whereupon the co walker dissipates and vanishes, which is a wonderfully spooky concept. I mean, just as a writer, you're sort of impressed by the imagination of it all. So that's what Second Sight was. And there were quite a lot of people, from a philosophical viewpoint, who were quite interested in it.
- [12:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What particularly drew their attention?
- [12:42]
Rachel Morris
Well, I think coming back to this idea that if people could see the fairies and if people could convincingly recount what they were like, it was one step closer to believing in God. I think that must have been the reason why people like Robert Boyle were interested in Second Sight.
- [13:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you talked of him in that lovely way as an anthropologist, so kind of an ethnographer of the fairy community. What do we learn about, you know, their habits?
- [13:10]
Rachel Morris
Well, he clearly has spent time sitting, talking and listening to his parishioners and to the local farmers and such like. And so he has deduced everything from them. And so he deduces that they're more visible at some times of the day and night than others, and at some times of the year rather than other times. He deduces, though it's not always clear exactly how, but he deduces how long they're likely to live. He deduces that they don't die in the way that we die, they just disappear. So he carefully goes through the evidence and from that, in a very thoughtful kind of way, he puts together what they might be.
- [13:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So in giving us a kind of outline of the realities as he sees this to a fairy existence, he's actually also giving us a very tangible sense of what people in Scotland at this time believed. And I'm very struck by the similarity to something like Carlo Ginzburg, the. The Cheese and the Worms, where we've got the story of a man called Minocchio who was interrogated, and we discover he has this system of belief, you know, about what existed is something that lots of history students will have come across at some point in time, that he has this idea about the angels being the worms and, you know, and so on, that he incorporates what we might see as superstitious ideas with Christian orthodoxy. Do you think that's what we're seeing here, really, is that Kirk's exploration of fairy nature is telling us about these multiple early modern attempts to reconcile folk beliefs with Christian doctrine?
- [15:01]
Rachel Morris
You do get the Impression of a great thoughtfulness going on here. It's absolutely not like the thought of folktales and fairy tales in the Victorian period is much more serious than that. And it's much more rigorous in its attempt to make sense of the world. There's nothing whimsical about it, I suppose I'd say this is serious stuff. That's why it has a kind of philosophical feel to it.
- [15:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned that Scotland had a kind of sense of being a place where more people had second sight. What is it about Scotland's religious landscape that shaped local beliefs to fairies and to witchcraft, or shaped ideas about being able to access those differently to perhaps what's happening south of the border or on the continent?
- [15:50]
Rachel Morris
Well, that's hard to pin down, but I would say that having spent some time in Scotland and the Western Isles, it is a landscape which is quite frequently quite spooky. I'm not at all surprised that these views and attitudes were held, because the landscape certainly in Western Isles is so beautiful, but so isolated and so otherworldly is the only way I can quite describe it. So it feels not surprising that these views would be explored up there. And I did go to Aberfoy, just out of sheer curiosity. And I walked in the fairy woods and the fairy hill, and it was April and it was a beautiful day and the sun was shining and the woods were very fresh and very lonely feeling and very beautiful. I wouldn't say I quite believe in this kind of thing, but I stood there and thought, well, I can see why people would.
- [16:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So there's something there in the geography or topography that's persuasive. I wonder if it's also something temporal. Do you wonder if there's. There's something about periods of rapid change like the 17th century that made belief in magic and the supernatural especially powerful or appealing?
- [17:09]
Rachel Morris
I could well believe that, yes. And again, you come back to your own life and you think about it and you remember Covid times, for instance, times of upset do make people tend towards magical thinking, I'm sure of it. It's to do with a panic about the world changing very fast.
- [17:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think Robert Kirk lived and died at the end of the 17th century, and there'd been a period in the late 16th, early 17th century where it felt like elite and popular ideas about the supernatural had at least overlapped for a period of time. Do you think that they are becoming separated as we get towards the end of the 17th century?
- [17:52]
Rachel Morris
Yes. Although to turn that the other way around, you might say it's surprising how not separated they are. I mean, because I think we tend to think of the late 17th century as a time which is approaching, you know, 18th century rationality and so on. So I was surprised at the extent to which members of the Royal Society did seem to believe not all of them, but many of them believed in witches, angels, all that kind of thing. So if anything, to my mind, I was slightly surprised by how close the elite views were still to the views of the ordinary people.
- [18:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
When does that start to change? I mean, you use the term the great disenchantment. What is this exactly that's happening?
- [18:37]
Rachel Morris
Well, the great disenchantment actually is a very contentious phrase because it was coined at a moment when maybe two generations ago, I would say, when there was quite a lot of confidence that first you had magic and then you had science, and that obviously science overtook magic, because obviously science made sense and magic didn't. And new generations of historians came along and said, well, actually, no, no, look and see, it isn't quite like that at all. And everyone cites the example of Newton, who was passionately interested in alchemy, as well, of course, as all the stuff he did, which we recognize as inspired science. So it is a bit contentious, to say the least, the idea that there was a great disenchantment. But I think certainly you can say that by the 18th century, fairy beliefs were becoming more private. I don't think people talked about them very much. Increasingly, they didn't talk about them. They were their private views. They weren't part of the public discourse. And I think you would find it quite difficult today to find a politician who openly espoused fairy Bruce. I think I could be contradicted on that one, but you know what I mean. I think that it was a very gradual process, and I think it is quite easy for us to slip back into magical thinking in moments of tension.
- [20:13]
Sleep Number Customer 2
Are you really buying a car online on Autotrader right now?
- [20:16]
Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
Really?
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Sleep Number Customer 2
At a playground?
- [20:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah. Really?
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Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
Look at these listings from dealers.
- [20:20]
Sleep Number Customer 2
Wow, your search can really get that specific.
- [20:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Really?
- [20:23]
Sleep Number Customer 2
And you just put in your info and boom, car's in your budget.
- [20:27]
Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
Mom needs a second.
- [20:28]
Sleep Number Customer 2
Honey, you can really have it delivered.
- [20:30]
Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car.
- [20:35]
Rachel Morris
Mommy.
- [20:36]
Sleep Number Customer 2
Uh, I think your kid is walking up the slide, Kyle.
- [20:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Again? Really?
- [20:40]
Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
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- [21:12]
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- [21:14]
Sleep Number Customer 1
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- [21:16]
Carvana Customer
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- [21:19]
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- [21:43]
Carvana Customer
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- [22:00]
Dr. Benjamin Woolley
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- [22:01]
Carvana Customer
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Sleep Number Narrator / Autotrader Narrator
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- [22:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
There is quite a sort of dominant narrative, in popular discourse, I'd say, of people thinking that ideas about magic and science were straightforwardly opposed. But as you say, if Isaac Newton held magical beliefs, that is harder to sustain, isn't it?
- [22:41]
Rachel Morris
Yes, it is harder to sustain and it's incredibly easy. And I meet this occasionally from time to time people say to me, but this is also obviously nonsense. How can you believe in it? And how can you write about people who believed in it? Because it's so obviously nonsense. To which I vehemently argue that it isn't obviously nonsense. And it's important to look at the past in a fairly open minded kind of way.
- [23:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think some of it's a question of terminology. We use the word belief and we use the word superstition. But actually, perhaps we need to complicate our understanding of these terms. Maybe superstition has only arisen as a term that of condemnation.
- [23:25]
Rachel Morris
Yes, I do think that's true. I also think my guess is that there's a gender thing going on here. There's a tendency for science to be assumed to belong to the world of men, the public realm and what they call magic and so on, to belong to the world of women that also, you know, you do have to unpick these things and go, no, no, no, no, it's not like that. But the phraseology isn't helpful. Things like superstition, because they're just so. Obviously, that's just superstitious, you know, it dismisses things without talking about them and seeking to understand them.
- [24:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So Robert Kirk, he's often remembered, if taw, as a marginal figure. Do you think that's fair or do you think he's representative or sharing how many rural people are of the 17th century understood the world?
- [24:21]
Rachel Morris
I think he's more interesting than that description would suggest, in that he deserves more attention than that. I think. I think he's interesting in that he's quite explicit about ideas which had been quite current in Europe from, oh, hundreds of years. A belief in spirits, for instance. And if we read Kirk carefully and really think about what he's saying, he is quite an introduction, quite a way into a mindset which vanished, I think, in the 18th and 19th centuries. But he is worth reading for that reason alone, I think.
- [25:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's talk a bit about his work then. How did his manuscript circulate? How did it get to London? What do we know about it at that time?
- [25:11]
Rachel Morris
Well, that is difficult to pin down. We know that he himself went to London because he was also a Gaelic scholar and he was busy translating the Bible into Gaelic. So we know he went to London and we know that he was connected or knew, maybe even was friends with Robert Boyle, the chemist, because Robert Boyle was interested in all these subjects. So on the one hand he was a minister in a remote part of Scotland, but on the other hand, he was connected to London in these ways. He probably also. He would certainly have read widely and so he would have picked up all kinds of ideas like that. So the more you look at it, the more you can see he's not totally alone. He's not a solitary figure. He is part of an intellectual world. As far as we can tell, somehow his manuscript survived his death. I don't think we quite know for sure how it survived its death, except that it did. We know that by the time Walter Scott discovered it in 1815 or thereabouts, there seemed to have been the one manuscript left. And we know that Walter Scott was so entranced by it that he copied it out. Whereupon, in true fairy fashion, of course, the original manuscript then disappeared. This is quite a story, full of those kind of moments. But by that time Scott had the copy, and we know that the copy at Some point moved across and was seen by Andrew Lang, the Scottish folklorist, and he was completely entranced by it. By that time, of course, the manuscript was more than 100 years old, probably approaching 150 years old, and very much the creation of another world and another time, but entrancing enough for Andrew Lang to be completely taken with it. And as it happened, of course, Andrew Lange was a part of a folkloric movement which was very strong in the second half of the 19th century, and so he read it through with a mindset that was already willing to be entranced by this kind of thing.
- [27:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah. So what did those 19th century folklorists make of it? Because you said a few times that what we are exposing here in the 17th century is a very different way of approaching fairies and that belief system from that of the 19th century. And it's. So much of what we know about history has gone through the sort of the millstones of the 19th century to arrive at us. What did they make of it?
- [27:51]
Rachel Morris
They were coming at folklore in a very particular kind of way. One of the things that interested them about folklore was that they saw it as evidence of an oral culture which had vanished with the coming of literacy and such like, and that it was therefore remarkable because it was probably the only way that you could reach back into the minds of people who had lived and died before literacy became widespread. So they were very entranced by the whole folklore thing from that point of view. In fact, of course, you can argue with that because you can say, hang on a second, how do we know that these stories have come down in a pristine, untouched fashion? Probably not. Do you know? I mean, illiterate poets have been playing around with folklore since the Middle Ages and probably before, but nonetheless, there was a huge movement towards folklore in the 19th century. Women played quite a large part in it. But it is unlikely to have matched up in an identical kind of way with the way that Robert Kirk saw the world. I suspect that for the 19th century, folklore, although entrancing, had already become part of the past, whereas for Robert Kirk, it had a feeling of the presence about it, if that makes sense.
- [29:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've done a lot of work on Dr. John Dee, who's going to be a character that's familiar to many people listening. Do you think there's a kind of continuity of belief between him and this minister in Scotland a century later, or should we think of it more discreetly?
- [29:39]
Rachel Morris
Well, it's always tricky to kind of hold onto ideas and say they were the same at one moment, and then the same a hundred years later. Everything is always changing. That said, I think there's probably a closer relationship between someone like John Dee and Robert Kirk than between, say, Robert Kirk and the 19th century folklore. I think there are continuities, although it is also the case, and this I did think was interesting when I noticed it, that there's a lovely moment in John Dee's diaries when his medium, his scryer, says to him, would you like me to introduce you to the fairies? And John Dee is absolutely horrified at the idea. And it comes across as a kind of snobbery, a kind of fairies, you know, that's what women believe in. It's probably what was going through his mind. It's hard to know, of course, always with these things, but there's a definite feeling of I don't touch the fairies, my magic is superior to that. And that, I think, brings you back to the whole male, female thing in all this.
- [30:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So Robert Kirk is unusual, not only that he's a minister of the church, but that he's taking interest in a peculiarly female form of magic.
- [30:57]
Rachel Morris
Yes. And I think it says a lot for him as a person. That is very much the impression one gets and it says a lot for him. Although, I mean, I may say that his description of the fairies includes men as well as women. They were families, he saw them as a community of families and so on. I would like to have met Robert Kirk. I think I would have liked him, I can say.
- [31:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I have to say that my idea about fairies has never been quite the same since I read Susanna Clarke's Dr. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, because it's given me such a sense of fairies as being a potentially malevolent kind of force in society.
- [31:36]
Rachel Morris
Yeah, I think it is a great novel. It is an absolutely beautiful novel, that one. And they could cause an awful lot of trouble and actually take pleasure in causing a lot of trouble. And you can see that in things like, you know, A Midsummer Night's Dream and so on. They weren't cuddly by any means, but
- [31:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
to annoys the world, certainly not at the moment. And I suppose that's what the 19th century folklorists did with fairy beliefs, is that they made them into something cuddly, the flower fairies at the bottom of the garden, as being something sweet, as opposed to something potentially menacing. Whereas actually, if we go back to Robert Kirk's story, the moment perhaps is most interesting to us is the story of his abduction by the fairies. How did that come about?
- [32:32]
Rachel Morris
Well, you're right. It isn't a cuddly bit of the story at all. It makes you realize that the fairies will take their revenge if you say too much about them. I don't know how it came about, but I would say that there are some examples of things or people who had one foot in the real world and one foot in legend and mythology. So you think about them as real people or real things, and yet somehow they've come tangled up in mythology. So it reminds me of, I don't know if, you know, in the V and A, there's a glass vase called the Luck of Edenhall, and it's in the basement and it has a story attached to it, so it's a real thing. And they think it probably originated in the Middle east in the Middle Ages, and it somehow came to England. But the story connected to it is that it belonged to a house in the north of England and that it was actually left behind by the fairies who dropped it by mistake and shouted out as they left, beware. Do not let this break or fall, because then will go the Luck of Edenhall. So it's that sort of moment where you look at this thing and it's completely real, that somehow it's got a bit tangled up with mythology and myth. And Robert Kirk's life is a bit like that. He existed for sure, but somehow, at a certain point, he just stepped away into myth.
- [34:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Having worked on this period, two questions about it. What has most surprised you in doing this research? And what is the sort of common misconception about this period that you'd like to correct?
- [34:20]
Rachel Morris
What surprised me? Well, so many things. I mean, it is a very surprising time. The stories, this strange mix of light and dark. You know, the fact that they can be malevolent but also uplifting. I mean, they work both ways. That always takes me by surprise. I suppose. The common misconception, I would say, is that it is very easy, because we live in a very sciencey kind of world, to dismiss all this as nonsense. I'm not saying I believe it, but I do think that we should never dismiss the past as nonsense. And I would also say that I'm deeply grateful to have been born in a time of science. You know, we all owe science a great deal. But what they had back then, maybe, was a sense of wonder and amazement. And that is a lovely thing to wake up in the morning and wonder and be amazed by the world. So you win some, you lose some, I suppose.
- [35:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What's next in your work, Rachel? Where Are you going next?
- [35:24]
Rachel Morris
I find that when I write, it's best to let the idea seize you rather than you trying to find the idea. Sometimes an idea just comes at you and says, write me, write me. And they're the ideas that tend to work out best cause you're just carried away by the story. I note that I am quite interested at the moment in the Fall of Constantinople. I'm not quite sure why I'm interested in Fall of Constantinople, but I am. I also know it's a sign of my interest when I start trying to devise holidays. So then I say to my partner, shall we go to such and such place? And he goes, you want to write about it? And often indeed I do want to write about it.
- [36:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, I love the fact that within your capacious mind you're holding the abduction by fairies of a man in 1692 and the fall of Constantinople some 150 years earlier. That is very encouraging for all of us who want to branch out into looking at different things. Thank you so much for coming on to share your thoughts. It's been really enlightening.
- [36:31]
Rachel Morris
Good. And thank you for having me on. I've enjoyed it.
- [36:34]
Dr. Benjamin Woolley
Thank you.
- [36:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And no pun intended there about the coming of the Enlightenment. That was Enlightenment.
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- [37:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, as I mentioned there with Rachel, Dr. John Dee is a name that might well be familiar to you as we've spoken about him here before on not just the Tudors, he was a trusted advisor to Elizabeth I, an astronomer, a mathematician, an astrologer, and a cartographer who's long been a source of fascination for his ties to the occult. In fact, he was not adverse himself to a bit of spirit conjuring and angelic communication. Dr. Benjamin Woolley is a writer, a journalist, and a fellow of English literature at Goldsmiths University of London, and he's the author of the landmark biography the Queen's the Life and magic of Dr. Dee. Dr. Woolley came onto Not Just the Tudors to tell me more about Dee, and here's a little taste of that episode. I asked him when Dee first became interested in speaking with angels.
- [38:40]
Dr. Benjamin Woolley
Difficult to know precisely when he started to move in this direction, but he was interested in Kabbalah, he was interested in numerology, as we would call it. He's interested in the Hebrew language because of its very ancient roots as perceived at the time. He came up with this very weird idea. He called it Monas Hieroglyphica, or the hieroglyphic Monad. Monad's a word we've completely lost touch with. Monad was a word that tried to capture the kind of unity that must exist somehow in the universe between the spiritual and the physical. And he presented this book on this idea, the Monas Hieroglyphica, complete with what you would now call an emoticon, this little sort of device that represented the whole idea. He presented this idea to the Queen and she was intrigued, apparently, and so were other members of the court. But then he, at some time in the late 1570s, he started to actually hire spiritual mediums, scryers, as they were known at the time. And he had a bunch of them pass through his house in Mortlake and they would have these sessions, they would sit down. Different people seemed to have had different methodologies how they did it. And then popped up this mysterious chap calling himself Edward Talbot, who apparently looked like he'd had his ears disfigured, possibly because he'd been involved in some sort of criminal activity. Again, all very vague, not entirely clear what was going on. Associated with some necromancy in the north, necromancy being where you use magic to try and bring bodies back to life, all sorts of disreputable things. But Talbot, who was later revealed to be this chap called Edward Kelly, was clearly an extremely persuasive man, young man, much younger than Dee by this stage. So he started in the early 1580s with Kelly acting as his medium. And Dee, by this stage, was in his 50s and quite well established at court. But Dee created a room in Mortlake, had a window facing the west. He had a little jewel, you'd call it a crystal ball now, but it was much smaller than that, put on a specially made table, whole sort of apparatus was set up. Dee would always abstain from sex, for example, and certain foods, and would clean himself very carefully before the beginning of. Of these spiritual sessions. And Kelly, in return, who's a very volatile figure, would nevertheless produce these extraordinarily rich visions. He would tell Dee what he was seeing in this crystal normally, and Dee scribbled down what he was being told. That's how we know about what was going on. And just the descriptions of the spiritual world he conjured, which was full of basically angels, archangels, interacting invisibly with the world. He would conjure up such a vivid narrative out of this. He should have been a novelist. It totally beguiled Dee. He believed it, he disbelieved it, he didn't know what to make of it. But disbelief was suspended because it was just such a kind of enchanting, in the literal meaning of that, if you like, this enchanting world that Kelly conjured.
- [41:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In 1583, Kelly and Dean Dee leave the Elizabethan court with their wives and embark on a European journey. They go to Poland and Bohemia, and what were they hoping to achieve in doing this?
- [42:05]
Dr. Benjamin Woolley
So they're left under the COVID of night again. We don't really know why, it's not really clear, but it was something to do with probably the sort of operations that he was undertaking with Deane. There's a sort of Polish aristocrat called Prince Laski visiting England or had done so just before. There's all sorts of strange things going on, and in order to understand it, you have to understand the very complex relationship between England and the continent and what was going on in the Holy Roman Empire. Most of us struggle to understand what the Holy Roman Empire is, let alone all the sort of complexities of the relationship between it and other parts of Europe and Britain. So there was something going on there and D was somehow involved in it. Whether he was driven out or drawn out is very hard to tell, but he did, as I say, leave in the COVID of night. So it was a sort of surreptitious enterprise. And they went off on this amazing journey to the Low Countries, the Netherlands, and to Krakow, and ending up in Prague, apparently, because he had been told to tell the Holy Roman Emperor himself, this rather eccentric, fabulous figure called Rudolf ii, that he needed to mend his ways, which is quite a thing to go and tell an emperor. And Dee did exactly that. He went there, got admitted to the court, and he told, in a private session with the Emperor, he said that he had to change his attitudes towards spirituality and the Holy Roman Emperor. How holy he was is very debatable, because Rudolf himself had, you might call Eclectic tastes. He was interested in alchemy and astrology and things like that. But essentially Dee was saying the sort of very basis of the Holy Roman Empire, namely Catholicism. I don't think he was saying Rudolf should become a Protestant, but he was saying that he needed to reform Catholicism, I suppose, and that was an incredible thing to go and do. And miraculously, he survived it. He was driven out of Prague eventually with Kelly, and they set up with an aristocrat elsewhere in the Czech Republic of Bohemia, as it was then called, in this marvellous, beautiful town called Esk Krumlov, and started doing alchemy experiments there. But it was an extraordinary journey and eventually he was forced back to England and Kelly just headed off into this extraordinary career, eventually becoming a member of the Bohemian nobility, essentially, until he got imprisoned. That was an inevitable outcome when it came to Kelly, tried to escape, broke both legs in the attempt, all sorts of things, and ended his days there, as far as we know. But Dee came back to England and he came back to find his beloved library. He built this enormous library, had been ransacked, turned out by members of the College of Physicians, because if you go to the Royal College of Physicians today and their library, it's absolutely full of Dee's books, how did they end up there, with all his powers drained away, all his sort of connections with Court and so on. So it was an extraordinary, epic journey, but for Dee, it was ultimately catastrophic.
- [45:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And do you think that he was, as some historians have suggested, at the mercy of Kelly's influence, that even his angelic visions were the result of Kelly's extreme persuasion?
- [45:25]
Dr. Benjamin Woolley
The important thing to remember is that Dee didn't have the angelic visions. He didn't see the angels. He recorded what he was told was seen. And the key to understanding why he thought this was convincing is that it had a coherence to it. Among other things, Kelly was basically very clever at feeding Dee what Dee clearly wanted. And one of the things he fed in was this idea that there was a language, it's come to be known as the Enochian language, that there was this Book of Enoch, which is one of the books that's not part of a main Bible, if you like, but the Book of Enoch sort of hints at this biblical character, Enoch, who's the grandfather of Noah, speaking the language before the Tower of Babel, the story of when languages all split apart because God was so displeased with humanity for behaving in the way they did, and tried to build a tower that would reach heaven again. That shows about how there was this idea of a physical link that was possible between Earth and heaven. But anyway that there was a language which predates that which was literally the language of God, and that what Enoch was giving Dee were hints as to what that language is. And Dee furiously set about trying to bring things together in order to try and work out what this language was. It was like he was hearing snippets of it.
- [46:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Dr. Benjamin Woolley and it's well worth revisiting the rest of that episode of Not Just the Tudors. The link is in the show notes for this episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thanks also to my researcher Max Wintle and my producer Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and Not Just the tudors@historykit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.
- [47:27]
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