An evening of public talks dedicated to representations of magic and the politics behind them. Our speakers will consider the ways in which magical beliefs and practices have been researched, debated, and distorted by a diverse range of interested parties at different moments in history.
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An evening of public talks dedicated to representations of magic and the politics behind them. Our speakers will consider the ways in which magical beliefs and practices have been researched, debated, and distorted by a diverse range of interested parties at different moments in history. Subjects will include Civil War-era Parliamentarians, who circulated rumours that Prince Rupert’s dog was, in fact, a transmogrified witch; American white-supremacists, who used depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ to justify Jim Crow; the online far-right who use the supernatural as a tool of radicalisation; and contemporary historians engaged in the study of the Wicca religion.
Event Information
Guests can join this event in person at Avenue Campus, University of Southampton.
We encourage guests to register at your earliest opportunity as spaces are strictly limited.
If you have any questions about this event please contact fahevent@soton.ac.uk.
About the speakers.
Professor Ronald Hutton, ‘The Politics of Studying Modern Pagan Witchcraft’
Modern Pagan witchcraft, or Wicca, has the unique characteristic of being the only religion inspired, however unwittingly, by academics: which made it in turn vulnerable to changes in academic accounts of the past. This lecture considers how this came to be and then explains the exceptional rewards and dangers sustained by a historian of this religion: in changing the nature of the religion itself, altering the attitudes of British society towards it, and incurring the suspicion manifested by many groups in that society towards it.
Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol Department of History, the foremost scholar of British paganism and author of a series of pioneering historical works, including Pagan Britain and The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.
Professor Mark Stoyle, ‘The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda during the English Civil War’
During the English Civil War of the mid-1640s, a white hunting-poodle named ‘Boy’ briefly became the most notorious dog in the kingdom. As Charles I and his opponents in Parliament strained every nerve to defeat each other on the battlefield, strange rumours began to circulate about Boy: the pampered pet of Charles’s nephew and chief cavalry commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Boy, it was whispered, was no ordinary dog, but was, in fact, a ‘Lapland Lady’ who had transformed herself into the shape of a dog through magical art. This paper shows how Parliamentarian propagandists deliberately spread the most fantastical rumours about Prince Rupert and ‘Boy’ between 1642 and 1644 in order to suggest that the Royalist cause was diabolically inspired.
Professor Mark Stoyle of the University of Southampton Department of History, a leading authority on the English Civil Wars and, most recently, author of A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549.
Dr Ashton Kingdon, ‘Folk Tales and the Führer: The Supernatural Propaganda of the Virtual Reich’
During the rise of the Nazi Party, its leadership sought to promote the group’s power by pervading every facet of German life, bending the nation’s history, culture, taste, and language to its cause. One method of such indoctrination—the adoption of traditional folktales as ideological weapons—proved a valuable means of recruiting the youth of the Third Reich. In many ways, Nazi propaganda itself became a fairy tale told to a receptive volk. This paper will ‘deep dive’ into the role mythology and folklore has had and continues to play in far-right ideologies and propaganda. It will detail the extent to which contemporary propaganda has structural similarities with historical representations of oppressed groups and describe how the far right have co-opted normative culture to conceal racialised messages that can thereby circumvent automated content-removal systems.
Doctor Ashton Kingdon of the University of Southampton Department of Criminology Department, author of The World White Web: Uncovering the Hidden Meanings of Online Far-Right Propaganda.
Dr David Cox, ‘Land of Blood: Haitian Voodoo and Jim Crow America’
In the late nineteenth-century, the US press began to seethe with stories of ‘voodoo’-inspired ritual sacrifice and cannibalism in Haiti. ‘Voodoo,’ it was alleged, was an imported African cult devoted to no less than the worship of Satan. The leaders of this cult, it was claimed, were the true power in the republic. These tales had enormous purchase on American imaginations, swiftly finding their way into Congressional debates, literary fiction, and the theatre. This paper demonstrates that such stories were used to reinforce the notion of Black racial regression that underpinned segregation and disenfranchisement during the 1890s and 1900s. Images of demonic, orgiastic ‘voodoo’ worship complemented and reinforced ideas of Black criminality and hypersexuality that were used to justify Jim Crow.
Doctor David Cox of the University of Southampton Department of History, currently on a British Academy Fellowship supporting the completion of his book, Conjuring Race: Perceptions of Black Magic in Nineteenth-Century America
Register now Highfield Road Southampton SO17 1BF