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Articles by Malcolm Gaskill
Squawking at the Gate
The modern zoo is nearly two centuries old. The zoological gardens in Regent’s Park were established in 1828 by the inventor Humphry Davy and the colonial adventurer Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore. It was a fitting collaboration: encompassing the globe and studying its minutiae were different aspects of the same imperial ambition.
Dangerously Scary
Released in 1945, Dead of Night is the most imaginative British horror film of the postwar era. It was produced by Ealing Studios and pioneered the anthology format, much imitated in subsequent decades. The film fits five ghost stories from four directors into a framework that gathers its own supernatural momentum. It’s only when Walter Craig, played by Mervyn Johns, pulls up outside a Kentish half-timbered cottage that we realise something strange has happened, or rather is about to happen.
Malcolm Gaskill · Bejesuited: America’s First Catholics
In the autumn of 2013, archaeologists digging beneath the chancel of a ruined church in Jamestown, Virginia, discovered four graves. They belonged to some of the earliest inhabitants of England’s first permanent colony in America. One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain of the expedition that founded Jamestown.
Perpetual Sunshine
There’s a scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of Radium to describe Dunthorne’s acerbic grandmother’s ‘fuzzy’ woollen jumper. Here, though, the blurring effect becomes a metaphor for our misty view of the past, a foreign country where the customs are silence and dissimulation.
The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy
In Austerlitz, W G Sebald describes how ‘when memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain’. In his new book, Malcolm Gaskill reaches for Sebald’s image, which encapsulates the limits of trying to reconstruct the past. You might see what’s on the other side of the immense ‘cloudy prism’, but only ever imperfectly.
We’re eating goose!
In 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to use as thread bobbins at court. Rebellion spontaneously combusted on nearby estates.
Pop, Crackle and Bang
When I was growing up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become.
Shriek before lift-off
Teresa of Ávila was a late starter, but that was no bad thing for a paragon of piety. A perplexed or misspent adolescence emphasised the transforming power of grace in both Catholic hagiography and puritan conversion narratives. She was born into a Castilian merchant family in 1515, but her fortunes were compromised by her family’s dubious status. Her converso grandfather was suspected by the Inquisition, leaving Teresa’s father to buy his way into respectable society.
The Bussolengo Letters
Cambridge in the autumn of 1989 seemed to me a lonely place. I had just taken up that loneliest of occupations, doctoral research in the humanities: three years of self-exile in libraries and archives, hard-up and haunted by doubt. My girlfriend had gone to study in Russia, and I’d never felt more isolated or adrift. Every morning I’d cycle to my college and sit in the ancient library, situated above the porters’ lodge and its adjacent pigeonholes.
Strike at the Knee
Ortona, Christmas Eve, 1943. A thriving Adriatic port only days previously, it now lay in ruins. The population of ten thousand was gone. In their place were two battalions of elite Fallschirmjäger – German paratroopers – defending what was left of the town, and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, who were under orders to take it. There would be no festive truce. Allied shells had siled down all day, Sherman tanks blasting house after house, driving the enemy deeper into the rubble.
Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches
Home > History > Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches By (author) Malcolm Gaskill One of the last criminal trials using the 1735 Witchcraft Act was, improbably, in London in 1944. The accused was Helen Duncan, a middle-aged Scotswoman. This is her extraordinary story.
Malcolm Gaskill · In-Betweeners: Americans in 16th-Century Europe · LRB 18 May 2023
In June 1616 the Virginian princess Pocahontas arrived in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much it suited the Virginia Company to pretend she was.
The pantomime of pardoning witches
On the surface, there was nothing extraordinary about the lives of John and Joan Carrington. He was a carpenter in his late forties with a small estate, mostly eaten up by debts, in the town of Wethersfield in Connecticut. She was his wife and mother to their daughter, Rebecca, and son, John junior, from a previous marriage.
Marquess Untrussed
In the cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick. She was alone and scared.
The Witches of Springfield – - Katrina Gulliver
It’s a few years since I’ve been to Springfield, Mass. And I have to say that it never gave me the impression of being a place for the supernatural. It’s one of those rare towns that is an Amtrak crossroads. You can head west on the Lake Shore Limited and go all the way to Chicago, or take the Vermonter South to New York, or head up to St Albans or East to Boston. Three hundred and eighty years ago, it wasn’t the crossroads of anything: it was close to the edge of the whole world its residents knew.
The Best New Books You Need to Read This November
If you are someone who set a reading goal as a New Year’s resolution, we’re here to remind you: there are only two months left to hit your reading goal. If you find yourself a little behind, no worries; we got you! There are loads of new books across all genres this November. From a new rock memoir to manga, exciting thrillers to steamy romance, there is something on this reading list for everyone to cozy up with this month.
Mundane Evil: An Overview of Witches and Puritans in 1630s New England
Life in early New England was dominated by piety and toil. It was an existence colonists stoically accepted; they had, after all, gone there to carve out new lives. Beneath the surface of most settlements, however, coursed dark currents of wrath. The mid-1630s were mired in controversy, as the intransigence of godly magistrates and ministers widened sectarian fault lines in Puritanism that had existed long before anyone went to America.
Barney Norris - Undercurrent
When: 17th November 2022 @ 7:30 pm – 9:15 pm 2022-11-17T19:30:00+00:00 2022-11-17T21:15:00+00:00 Where: The Bookseller Crow on the Hill 50 Westow St London SE19 3AF UK With great anticipation we welcome the brilliant playwright and author Barney Norris to read from and discuss his new novel, Undercurrant.
Embittered, Impaired, Macerated
In July 1657 William Wood, a young immigrant to Maryland, was paddling along a creek of the Patuxent River when he found a body floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men. Witnesses at the inquest testified that Dandy had often beaten Gouge, who had no water in his lungs, meaning that he hadn’t drowned.
Blood & Ink
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Like Oysters in Their Shells
This is what happens when you die. Electricity stops flowing through your neural circuitry and consciousness shuts down as though a switch has been flicked. Blood keeps moving for a while, ebbing without the heart’s propulsion before succumbing to gravity and pooling in the lower back where it congeals. Starved of oxygen, cells are dismantled by enzymes with nothing else to do now life is at an end. Three or four hours later the cooling body enters rigor mortis.
Quick with a Stiletto
On 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome. At 3.45 p.m. Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. Fifty seconds later the bomb exploded. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured.
Malcolm Gaskill on witchcraft, gender-politics and being shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2022
Malcolm Gaskill on witchcraft, gender-politics and being shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2022 The Wolfson History Prize revealed its shortlist for 2022 in April, showcasing the best historical non-fiction titles from the previous year including Malcom Gaskill’s The Ruin of All Witches, a dark, fascinating, real-life tale of witch-hunting in colonial New England.
The Best History Books: the 2022 Wolfson Prize Shortlist
Before we get into discussing what you and your fellow Wolfson History Prize judges regard as the best history books of 2022, have you noticed among them any particular approach to history or way of dealing with the past that is particularly original or interesting? I think the shortlist shows us that history is in a very healthy state. All six of these books are very beautifully produced. They have a very varied and intriguing subject matter. You have all sorts of different people being discussed.
Keith Thomas · Wicked Converse: Bewitched by the Brickmaker · LRB 12 May 2022
These days , Springfield is the most populous suburb of Chelmsford, the county town of Essex. But until the 1950s it was a mere village, situated a mile north-east of the city on the old Roman road. This is where William Pynchon, a key figure in Malcolm Gaskill’s new book, went to live in 1610. Born in 1590 in Writtle, another Essex village, he grew up to be a convinced Puritan, profoundly unsympathetic to the church of Charles I and William Laud.
In this Christmas special of Travels Through Time our three wise presenters Peter, Violet and Artemis get together to remember some of their favourite books and episodes from the last year on the podcast. | Travels Through Time
In this Christmas special of Travels Through Time our three wise presenters Peter, Violet and Artemis get together to remember some of their favourite books and episodes from the last year on the podcast.
You can have it for a penny
In the summer of 1942, an Oxfordshire housewife began a series of brief encounters with a man who was not her husband. They met at a café in Birmingham and then in Banbury on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings weren’t romantic – she was a Soviet spy and he a scientist who knew ‘the most dangerous secret in the world’.
Trick or Treat - Ten Books Featuring Witches
Collections By Liz Robinson | 13th October 2021 The word witch may conjure images of cauldrons, cackles and broomsticks, or witch-hunting trials and persecutions of women, or even modern witchcraft, a contemporary religion based around a reverence for nature. So what do you think of when you hear the word witch? For me a whole variety of images and thoughts sit in my minds eye. Witch is still used as an insult today, usually against women, should it be?
Malcolm Gaskill · Short Cuts: Charity Refused · LRB 9 September 2021
Afew weeks ago, a man appeared in my front garden as I was trimming the hedge. Slight in stature, in his early twenties with short dark hair, he was wearing a huge hold-all as though it were a rucksack. His unsmiling face radiated intensity as he began his spiel: name, from the North, recent discharge from the army, trying to get back on his feet. He even gave his service number, as if old habits die hard, or to prove bona fides.
Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt
At 1 p.m. on 13 July 1936, bidding opened at Sotheby’s on a trunk of Isaac Newton’s notebooks and papers. They had been in the family of the earl of Portsmouth for many years: a previous earl had lent them to the University of Cambridge, where scholars judged them of little scientific importance. Partly because of this indifference, the auction was overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast.
At the House of Mr Frog
Cartoonists find it as easy to draw puritans as they do Vikings. There’s an example on my pinboard. A behatted man, buttoned up in black, admires his wife’s sampler, which reads: ‘Way to Go, God.’ ‘Nice sentiment, Martha,’ he beams. Martha wears the same gloomy sub fusc, with black bonnet and broad linen collar. Putting slang in puritan mouths is fun because we know that precision and decorum in speech were hallmarks of righteousness.
Money, Sex, Lies, Magic
In autumn 1937 a statue of Katharina Kepler was unveiled in Eltingen, the village near Stuttgart where she had been born three centuries earlier. Barefoot, wearing a shift, sickle in hand, she represented the ideals of rustic nobility and honest toil cherished by the Third Reich. The mayor said that Frau Kepler also stood for the determination to uphold truth in the face of persecution: accused of diabolism, she had resisted.
On Quitting Academia
In May, I gave up my academic career after 27 years. A voluntary severance scheme had been announced in December, and I dithered about it until the pandemic enforced focus on a fuzzy dilemma. Already far from the sunlit uplands, universities would now, it seemed, descend into a dark tunnel. I swallowed hard, expressed an interest, hesitated, and then declared my intention to leave. A settlement agreement was drafted, and I instructed a solicitor.
Man Is Wolf to Man
In 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more.’ Even then Sansom thought the book might flop, so he began another, set in 1930s Spain.
Malcolm Gaskill reviews ‘A Supernatural War’ by Owen Davies · LRB 4 July 2019
In 2001 an architect called Danny Sullivan claimed to have found cine film of an angel while rooting around in a Monmouth junk shop. This was, unsurprisingly, a hoax, as were claims that Marlon Brando had paid £350,000 for the footage. But the alleged provenance was intriguing. Sullivan invented a psychical researcher called William Doidge, who had, he said, fought with the Scots Guards at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The angel had been caught on camera much later, in the Cotswolds in 1952.
LRB · Malcolm Gaskill · Plot 6, Row C, Grave 15: Death of an Airman
Tezze was devastated during the First World War, which isn’t surprising, given its proximity to the front, which ran along the Piave River, a mile or so away. In October 1917, after the Italians were routed at the Battle of Caporetto, a hundred miles north-west, the Austrians advanced and occupied Tezze for a year until the tide turned at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. A combined force of Italian troops and the British 7th Division then crossed the Piave and recaptured the town.
The natives did a bunk
When my editor asked for dust-jacket ideas, I said I wanted something with snow. My book was about 17th-century America, and for all the sweltering, maize-shrivelling summers, it was the winters that had stuck in my mind. I’d found the perfect image: George Henry Boughton’s Pilgrims Going to Church (1867), a depiction of settlers in New Plymouth trudging through their first winter. Why the snow seemed important I’m not sure.
Malcolm Gaskill reviews ‘A Cold Welcome’ by Sam White · LRB 19 July 2018
Malcolm Gaskill A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America by Sam White Harvard, 361 pp, £23.95, October 2017, ISBN 978 0 674 97192 9 When my editor asked for dust-jacket ideas, I said I wanted something with snow. My book was about 17th-century America, and for all the sweltering, maize-shrivelling summers, it was the winters that had stuck in my mind.
Malcolm Gaskill · On Strike · LRB 5 April 2018
The university strikes reached the end of their fourth week just before the start of the Easter break. More than a million students at 65 universities had been affected and, according to the University and College Union (UCU), the body to which the strikers belong, more than half a million teaching hours lost.
Malcolm Gaskill reviews ‘London’s Triumph’ by Stephen Alford · LRB 8 February 2018
The Tudors knew all about the uncertainty caused by weak leadership and isolation on the world stage. After the break with Rome, complete by 1534, England stood alone. Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule.
Malcolm Gaskill reviews ‘The Witch’ by Ronald Hutton · LRB 2 November 2017
The province of Enga in the highlands of Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest and most lawless places on earth. On 18 May 2015 ten men armed with machetes, axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles epidemic.
Call for Papers: Living in a Magical World: Inner Lives, 1300-1900
Detail of an image from the Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere (c.1775). Wellcome Library, London (CC BY 4.0).
Pilgrims and the Roots of the American Thanksgiving
In the fall of 1621, 50 English men and women and 90 Native Americans gathered at New Plymouth in Massachusetts. The colonists had arrived a year earlier on a leaky wine ship, the Mayflower, and built a hillside settlement overlooking the ocean, little more than a few wooden huts in a stockade. The first winter had been terrible: Half their number had perished from malnutrition and disease.
Roads from Rome: unpicking the myths of the Reformation
This year’s 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses, the deed that kick-started the Reformation, has inevitably...
Malcolm Gaskill reviews ‘The Astronomer and the Witch’ by Ulinka Rublack · LRB 30 June 2016
In autumn 1937 a statue of Katharina Kepler was unveiled in Eltingen, the village near Stuttgart where she had been born three centuries earlier. Barefoot, wearing a shift, sickle in hand, she represented the ideals of rustic nobility and honest toil cherished by the Third Reich. The mayor said that Frau Kepler also stood for the determination to uphold truth in the face of persecution: accused of diabolism, she had resisted.
Witchfinders
'The most chilling witch-hunt in English history ... fascinating' Independent on Sunday Uitgeverij Van Ditmar Boekenimport B.V. Imprint John Murray Press Uitgegeven als Paperback Eerste editie 24-04-2006 Laatste editie 01-10-2007 ISBN 9780674025424 • 9780719561214 Aantal pagina's 384 Taal Engels
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