It was a Theocracy based on Old Testament laws and teachings that vilified Pagan rituals, collectively termed “witchcraft”. The pervading sense of a community destablised and riven with insecurities depicted in Manningtree Witches resonates with today’s readers. At the margins of this diminished community are those who are barely tolerated by the affluent villagers - the old, the poor, the unmarried, the sharp-tongued. susan pui san lok: "I was interested in seven of the sites that were nominated by the public, 7 out of 270, and all of the sites were somehow associated with the folklore around witchcraft or referenced the witch persecutions across the East of England over a 200 year period including a very concentrated period between 1645 and 1647. When she has finished she shakes herself off with a few jerks of her haunches and clambers back into the cot.

After 1550, there were laws and ordinances legalising the persecution of witches and making witchcraft a capital offence. Were you able to read the novel with a sense of curiosity and openness, or did your background knowledge give a sense of foreboding? This false equivalence, combined with a desperate need to demonstrate piety and devotion to the Christian triune God, provided a religious justification for the persecution and murder of countless women.Beyond the uncanny way it makes her look — like a fairy came along and scrubbed the meats clean of spots — people get terribly superstitious about such things as cataracts, and choose to believe that God would not be so cruel as to rob an old woman of her earthly gaze without equipping her with a spectral one, to say sorry. A good part of the hilarity is attributable to Helen Clark, Oreo’s mother, whose insights are scattered throughout the novel in the form of letters to her children.

Quite early on I wanted to bring it in to the gallery in some way and make that presence disturbing and awe inspiring and to explore through that the relationship to place and history and myth.I can tell you now,” insists Mary, “when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say it was not worth it. Given the entrenched misogyny, together with religious zealotry sanctioned by both Church and State in the 1640s, there was little hope for any woman accused of being a witch. The discipline of history doesn’t allow that, which often leaves it gesturing toward the silencing without being able to give it voice. Her poetry and prose writing have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in The London Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among other publications. They are an invaluable resource for understanding the dimensions of women’s lives at this time in history.