The Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials

Abstract

Underlying this chapter is a concern, shared by many academic historians, about the lack of fit between what they do (or think they do) and what the public is offered by way of a view of the past through channels of information other than the academic monograph or the scholarly article.1 This concern is one that I feel especially as a working social historian whose perspective on the early modern period has been, and still is, informed by a ‘History from Below’ approach.2 I remain perplexed as to how English history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it is portrayed in popular novels, in Simon Schama’s television series History of Britain, in movies even as avowedly modernistic as Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and in anything by David Starkey, presents a view of the early modern English past which is certainly thematically, and probably ideologically, conservative. Since the 1960s, two or possibly by now three generations of social and cultural historians have opened up a totally new perspective on the history of early modern England.3 As far as those controlling most of the ways in which the public gain access to history are concerned, they need not have bothered. The public is fed warmed-over version after warmed-over version of the lives of Tudor monarchs, while the experiences of their subjects remain largely unexplored in non-academic history.