Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it took place in the reign of James I. And James I, of course, was a king who was absolutely terrified of witches.
A ship that he was once in nearly sank and he blamed it on witchcraft.
And forever thereafter, he thought there were witches everywhere.
He wrote a book on them, demonology.
warning everybody of the reality of witches and of how evil they were, and he presided over witch trials himself.
So the setting for the Pendle Witch Trial is both wild, rugged, isolated, and in a country that is gripped by witch mania.
We are, of course, in the reign of King James I now, which is long after the Reformation, and many people assume that killing witches was a thing that the Catholic Church mainly did.
Historically, the Catholic Church didn't really care about magic or witchcraft.
The Church was interested in whether your Christianity was orthodox or heretical, whether you were doing Christianity right.
They thought that magic and witchcraft didn't exist because the only powers in the world that could affect the supernatural space
was god christ and the saints they were the only people who could do miracles therefore everything else was fraudulent so to the extent the church had a problem with witches it was because they were making stuff up that wasn't real but the church didn't try them and didn't persecute them for most of its medieval history
That is, until about 1400, when something, and it's not really clear what, changed.
It was a little bit after Black Death and obviously people had very different ideas about life and meaning after such a devastating event that killed so much of Europe.
But a Dominican friar called Cramer wrote a book called Amalius Maleficarum, The Hammer of the Witches.
And in it, he really relied on that bit in the Bible in Exodus that says, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
And so from that point on, the church did start persecuting witches.
But the vast majority of the witch craze happened after the Reformation.
And it was more to do with Protestant theology that whereas in the Catholic world, as long as you went to mass and observed the sacraments, you were saved.
In the more Protestant world, everybody was now fighting a personal battle against the devil.
So it became much easier for people in communities to point out those who they thought weren't fighting quite hard enough and were imperiling themselves and other people.
Showing 261–280 of 436 · page 14 of 22
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