Bramasole

Easter - Rudnik Mikhail Markovich , 2019.

Russian , b. 1960 -

Artist John Patrick Salisbury’s “Drew and Jimmy” series, 1990-95.

A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1648, Margaret Jones was hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution carried out in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an English settlement on the east coast of North America.

“Medieval witchcraft trials could be more explicit and serious, as we saw with Alice Kyteler in the 1320s. A century after that episode, England burned the mystical warrior Joan of Arc for heresy and treason, but with supplementary charges of invoking spirits. A few years later, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, did penance for attempting to kill Henry VI using sorcery; her accomplices, an astrologer and cunning woman, were executed. But these were political show trials, side effects of the transition of power from medieval courts to modern governments. This was only a vague precursor of the practice whereby villagers pursued malevolent neighbours at law. That came in the 16th century with demographic growth, economic competition, cultural fragmentation, confessionalstate-building, and the expansion of the law – a far more extensive transformation of European life”.

[p. 70 – Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction by Malcolm Gaskill]

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Boy and Owl by Igor Skaletsky