1The Trials of the Pendle Witches, which took place in 1612 has made history, so much so that it now belongs to heritage industry (Sharpe 1). At the beginning of ‘The Pendle Witch Child’, a 2011 BBC documentary on the events, Poet Laureate Simon Armitage claims, ’This is a story about fear, politics, religion, science and magic. But to me, as a poet, it‘s also about words and stories, and just how powerful they can be’ (Armitage 2011). Unsurprisingly, a few poets have summoned the witches to reassess their stories through poetic words. From single poems (Clare Pollard’s 2008 ‘Pendle’ in The Changeling, Carol Ann Duffy’s 2012 ‘The Lancashire Witches’ written along the Lancashire Witches Walk, Helen Ivory’s 2024 ‘Margaret Johnson’ and ’Pendle Tourist‘ in Constructing a Witch) to pamphlets (Camille Ralph’s 2016 Malkin) and full-fledged collections (Geraldine Monk’s 1995 Interregnum and Blake Morrison’s 1996 Pendle Witches, both reworked and republished for the 400th anniversary of the trials in 2012), the witches have been turned into a poetic trope that allows to travel the distance between past and present, to explore the ethical implications of giving a voice and to reflect on modern ways of commodifying history and consuming the past.
2Because they mostly choose dramatic monologues, the poets give a voice to the miswritten participants of the trial, those who Linda Hutcheon has called ‘the ex-centrics, the marginalised, the peripheral figures of fictional history’ in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988, 114). The poems not only use historical research in their handling of the event, they also interrogate the process of history-making and writing history by experimenting with the poetic form and the concept of voice: devices such as multiple narratives, dialect writing, and free spelling are used to critically and creatively rewrite the Pendle trials, to produce a text that is ‘other’ to the official textual source provided by Thomas Potts’s 1613 The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster and his contemporaries, but also by modern historiography. Indeed, they do not just recast the witches as the innocent victims of a judicial and patriarchal system but foreground their agency in different ways. Besides, some of these works are intermedial in nature and rearranged through the years, thus calling into question the infallibility of the written word. What they offer is a path towards more creative reconfigurations of the past, thus escaping the imposition of a new single narrative. Before delving into this neo-historical poetic corpus, a brief overview of the trials and their place in British culture seems required.
3In 1612, ten persons accused of witchcraft were found guilty and hanged, one died before the trial, one was sentenced to stand on the pillory on four market days, and five were acquitted. In ‘Pendle Tourists’, Helen Ivory summarises the main events that led to the trial through the many narratives that have been passed down to us:
Some tellings raise the curtain on old Demdike and Chattox
outwitching each other with herbs and with curses,
and selling protections to put bread on their tables.
Some fix on Alizon and her suckling black dog;
how she begged pins from a pedlar for tacking a dress,
or a love charm. Either way he refused, and she cursed him.
Soon after he suffered a stroke, they say now.
Though in his eyes, to her mind, she witched him lame
with the aid of the dog who spoke human words. (Ivory 57)
4Indeed, events leading to the investigation and the sentence included a pedlar’s stroke, which was interpreted as a witchy act of retaliation against the victim who had refused to sell the pins that were needed for magical purposes; a gathering at the Malkin Tower, one of the alleged witches’ home, which was deemed a witch sabbath; and a couple of coerced confessions. This was enough for authorities to suspect a major witchcraft outbreak, which demanded immediate action. The trial led to the hearing of some 40 locals and the intervention of King James, who had endorsed witch hunting a few years before in his Daemonology (1597). This sensational trial immediately made it into writing thanks to The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, a supposedly verbatim account of the trial, which was written by Thomas Potts, who was the clerk to the Lancaster Assizes at the time. The account was published in 1613 after judges Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley revised and corrected the manuscript. This written legal document was passed off as direct verbal testimony, but included many commentaries by the author. According to Stephen Pumfrey in ‘Potts, Plots and Politics: James I’s Daemonologie and The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches’, this account was also meant to advance the JP‘s careers: ’I do, however, believe that Bromley and Altham worked very closely with Potts to manipulate the extraordinary records into an account that would protect and advance their careers’ (32). This explains why it actually left aside a few facts while fabricating the voices of the accused. Ivory subtly hints at the fabricated nature of history, which is a dramatization of facts (‘raise the curtains on’) that can lead to ‘fix[ation]’.
5Contemporary historiographical research into witchcraft shows that outbreaks of witch-hunting have multiple interpretations:
Perhaps the most widely accepted of these would revolve variously around the impact of the more intense religiosity generated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; the processes of state formation; the impact of socio-economic change, and more particularly population pressure and the resultant pressure on resources, in rural communities; and the problem of gender, of why so many of those accused as witches were women. (Sharpe 5)
6More specifically, the fear of a gunpowder plot against Lancashire Castle in the wake of Guy Fawkes’s failed attempt against Parliament seven years earlier, the contested issue of maleficium between Protestants and Catholics in the decades around 1600, basic neighbourly jealousy that led some to revive feuds that had started years before, as well as the stigma of poverty, the repression of non-conformism, patriarchal laws, and the unquestioned credit given to a child witness, form a complex nexus of contextual factors that inevitably led from an unfair trial to an unjust sentence, resulting in the Pendle Witches being reframed today as innocent victims of mistrial.
7In ‘The Pendle Witch Child’, Armitage also claims that it was ’one of the most disturbing witch trials on record‘ (Armitage 2011). The poet chooses to focus the narrative on Jennet Device, the 9-year-old whose accusations led to her own mother included—being hanged. Ironically, 21 years after the hangings, Jennet, now a grown-up, was in turn accused of witchcraft by a 10 year-old. Yet this time, the child’s testimony was questioned and finally rebutted, meaning that she was found not guilty, even though she was not discharged and eventually died in prison. For Armitage, the trials mark a ’transition between a pre-modern world and our supposed age of reason‘ (Armitage 2011), the adjective ’supposed’ casting doubt as to how open to critical enquiry and free thought our times really are. Indeed, he later adds that ‘our fear of evil has never really gone away, and neither, some say, has evil itself’ (Armitage 2011). From a narrative and aesthetic point of view, not only does the documentary show the places where the events unfolded, refer to the testimonies that have been passed down and interview researchers who have explored the subject, but it also tries to translate the fears of the early 17th century into our own times—foregrounding the idea that the historical material can be reached through archival research, but that the sense of history in the making can only reach us when mediated through artistic representation. In the documentary, this mediation is provided by Phoebe Boswell’s s ‘hand-drawn, translucent, spectral-looking animation’ (Buckley 93) of Jennet, ‘which recalls the spectral line drawing of contemporary gothic graphic novels and illustrations’ (95). The point is to stir the viewers’ emotions so that they have a sense of what meeting that child must have been like in the early 17th century.
8The trial has come down to us through a large body of literature and artistic productions. For instance, The Late Lancaster Witches, a melodrama by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was published in 1634 and performed by the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre. Later, in Victorian England, the event was romanticised and conflated with the gothic tradition, for instance in William Harrison Ainsworth‘s 1848 novel The Lancashire Witches. It then became a central element of local folklore, as in Thomas Baines’s 1867 History of Lancashire and John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson’s 1882 Lancashire Folklore, which popularised the image of the witch on a broomstick. Victorian representations of witchcraft like Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1856 short story ‘The Poor Clare’, set just over the hill in the Trough of Bowland, contributed to what Catherine Spooner terms ‘Lancashire Gothic’ (47). The region is so penetrated with the event that 19th-century works and poems set on the Pendle Hills usually namecheck the trials one way or another as in William Billington’s 1876 ‘The Pendle Hill: A Poem’, a series of thirty-nine Spenserian stanzas on a day out with friends on the hill, or John Rushton’s ‘Pendle Hill: On Reading Mr W. Billington’s Poem’. Robert Neill also dramatised the event in his 1951 novel, Mist over Pendle, while Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 Good Omens pays homage to the witches. It has now become a topos of fantasy literature (Stacey Hall‘s 2019 The Familiars) and young people literature (Yvette Fielding’s 2023 The Witches of Pendle).
92012 saw a surge of commemorative events and artistic creations: Philippe Hanford’s 1612 installation on Pendle Hill, the Pendle Sculpture trail, David Palmer’s statue of Alice Nutter in Roughlee, Lancashire, Richard Shannon‘s Sabbat and Richard MacSween’s Devilish Practices (two plays), Jeannette Winterson’s novella The Daylight Gate, and Livi Michael’s novel for Young Adults Malkin Child were all displayed in 2012 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the trials. Even though one may indulge in an ironical comment and say that the commodification of the Pendle trial is thriving with many offers in town, it is important to bear in mind the importance the figure of the witch has taken on since the 1980s, especially for feminist and anti-capitalist writers, from Starhawk‘s 1982 Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics to Mona Chollet’s 2018 Sorcières: La Puissance invaincue des femmes and Céline Du Chéné’s 2019 Les Sorcières, une histoire de femmes. The same interest can be traced in poetry, as proved by three recent publications: Rebecca Tamás’s 2019 WITCH, Clare Askew‘s 2021 How to Burn a Woman, and Helen Ivory’s 2024 Constructing a Witch.
10This article will tackle some works by Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Ivory, Geraldine Monk, Blake Morrison, Clare Pollard, and Camille Ralph in order to examine the way contemporary poetry can make sense of an event like the Pendle witch trial in historical, ethical and literary terms. To do so, I will first focus on the necessarily palimpsestual nature of these texts as they rewrite a huge body of works. Then I will analyse the othering devices that question the whole concept of ’giving a voice‘ and ’speaking for’. Finally, I will suggest that these works nevertheless encourage the readers to body forth the voices of the past.
11The poems, pamphlets and collections on the trial published in the last 20 years are neo-historical first because they constantly remind the readers that they are engaging with an event that has been passed down in many previous literary accounts—they bring attention to their palimpsestual nature in the sense that they include strategies of erasure, concealment and fragmentation as creative tools against dominant narratives. For example, Morrison‘s A Discoverie of Witches is a patchwork of earlier texts, forms and genres, similar to Potts’s compilation of reported speeches, pleas, and depositions. However, while Potts’s work attempted to pass as a verbatim account, Morrison‘s text emphasises its own fictional nature through typography, with italicised passages from 17th-century treatises like Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer, or, The Magicall-astrologicall-diviner Posed, and Puzzled by John Gaule (23) or Alexander Roberts’s A Treatise of Witchcraft (Morrison 26), which convey the perceived evil power of women (more than witches). He also alludes to much more canonical texts, such as the witches’ chant in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (25), as well as the form of the limerick (25 and 28), so as to echo both the magical chants of witches and the words of their persecutors. Fairy tale-like prose passages narrate events matter-of-factly, highlighting an inescapable sequence of episodes (‘And once there lived / And Demdike had a daughter / As mother and daughter plotted together . . .’ [25]), while longer stanzas resemble courtroom testimonies, where unidentified voices reflect on the trials and their own part in the unfolding of the events and express a sense of incredulity. This patchwork is foregrounded by the use of ornamental breaks that look like tilde. There is not just one narrative, but a collage of different voices, and each one of them is presented as constructed. The collage of texts, the fragmented aspect of the poem, the lack of authenticity of the language used (it is modernised even when it sounds archaic) underscore the constructed nature of witchcraft accusations and the social discourse that perpetuated these beliefs. By doing so, the poems shatter the very idea that witches exist. The only evil there is lies in the treatment of those who do not have power.
12One of Monk’s poems in the 1994 version of Interregnum is actually called ‘palimpsestus’ (111), the use of Latin foregrounding the legal aspect of the document. It also reads like a collection of fragments from speech and writing with a large use of typography and punctuation (capital letters, italics, bold, brackets . . .). Monk initially relied on local folklore and Potts’s account—which she calls ‘an eyewitness account. A real version of reality rather than a version of fantasy’ (2012, n.p.), thus breaking away from what current historiography says about the account. The scientific literature on the trial was sparse in the 1980s and this was probably her only source for quite some time. She notes the growing interest in the trial prompted by its 400th anniversary, which saw historical research propelled by ‘women’s studies, with its revisionism of women’s history . . . counterbalanced, perhaps even more strongly than ever before, by the caricature witches now promoted by the tourist industry’ (2012, n.p.). Her collection disrupts definitive meaning, debunks any suspicion that language—and history—may be linear or sites of truth, reinforces the idea of witches as continually overwritten figures, and sees the cultural treatment of the Pendle trial as a phenomenon that makes it possible to observe the backlash against women‘s rights.
13Camille Ralphs, in her examination of the Pendle witches, more directly challenges the reliability of Potts, which she calls ’debatable’. The authenticity of discourse on the past is thus denied. She nevertheless quotes his Wonderfull Discoverie in the endnotes, which aims at giving a short biography of the witches. Yet, Ralphs lists other sources in her acknowledgements, like Armitage‘s The Pendle Witch Child, but also Joyce Froome’s A History of the Pendle Witches and their Magic, a book whose goal is to make the reader feel what it was like to be a witch in the early 17th century. Her epigraph quotes from The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by Reginald Scot, who upheld that the prosecution of those accused of witchcraft was irrational and unchristian.
14Finally, Carol Ann Duffy also registers the nefarious voice of political and religious power by referencing the biblical command, ’Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live‘ (Exodus 22:18 from the King James Bible), in the first tercet of her poem. The inclusion of the line may suggest the permanence of this injunction in today’s world, even more so as it is engraved on a waymarker along the Pendle trail, a 48 mile trail from Pendle to Lancaster. Yet they are reinterpreted over time and with physical distance, as each new tercet along the trail questions the meaning of the word ’witch‘. Besides, the location of the poem makes it participatory—the Pendle Trail website encourages hikers to rub the stones while walking by, that is to say, to actively participate in the rubbing off of the text, already eroded by the weather. The Pendle Hills themselves become a text, open to exploration both physically and conceptually, echoing the act of erasure and rewriting inherent in a palimpsest. Multilayered temporalities and a sense of agency are thus conferred to future generations.
15Through these varied poetic productions, the idea emerges that witches are socially constructed figures, continuously rewritten and reinterpreted across time, and the focus is not so much on the historical material itself as it is on how the previous narratives do not make a coherent whole. Their palimpsestual poeticising of this defictionalised past reads as a form of redress and empowerment.
16Othering strategies were used to silence the Pendle ’witches’. While Duffy, Morrison and Monk display the power dynamics at work and link the witches‘ fate to more global histories, Rego and Ralphs try to find a way out to give the witches a sense of agency.
17Indeed, Carol Ann Duffy makes the connection between marginalised populations and silencing clear: ’I was struck by the echoes of under-privilege and hostility to the poor, the outsider, the desperate, which are audible still’ (2012). She makes it manifest that accusations of witchcraft are class-bound through a metacommentary that plays on a quasi-anagram: ‘From poverty, no poetry / but weird spells, half-prayer, half-threat.’ Besides, her poem was commissioned by Sue and Pete Flowers, two artists who, in the wake of two exorcisms performed on children that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000 and that of Kristy Bamu in 2010, decided to fight off the climate of general suspicion by collaborating with Safe Child Africa: ‘Scapegoating and child witchcraft accusations exist across the word today and we were pleased to partner with the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria—now known as Safe Child Africa http://www.safechildafrica.org/ to raise awareness of the global nature of witchcraft accusations today’ (Green Close Website). In the light of these gruesome events, Duffy ironically questions the idea of a progress of history:
But that was then—when difference
made ghouls of neighbours;
consolation: no grave
only future tourists who might grieve.
18The slant rhyme (’grave‘ / ’grieve’) is reminiscent of Wilfred Owen‘s ’Strange Meeting’—in 1612, in 1914 and in the 21st century, the disenfranchised are othered and deprived of agency. Once again, the hiker-reader, that is to say the tourist, can redeem the violence of the past by taking action, be it only by mourning.
19Monk follows the same line. The first section of the collection introduces Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Catholic poet who studied and taught Philosophy at the Jesuit College in Stonyhurst, overlooking Pendle, and who inhabited the same landscape and religious culture that shaped the story of the accused. In the ‘Chancaster’ section, Monk uses three of Hopkins’s poems to create erasure poems, selecting and reconfiguring his words to emphasise her own interpretation of Marian devotion (‘Demdike Sings’ is based on ‘The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe’, while ’Chattox Sings‘ and ’All Sing’ are based on ‘The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo’). The first stanza of ‘Demdike Sings’ reads:
Wild air,
world-mothering air,
nestling me everywhere,
that’s fairly mixed
with riddles
and is strife
in every least things life
and nursing element. (2012, 9)
20While Hopkins’s ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe’ began with:
Wild air, world-mothering air,
Neastling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; does home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing‘s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element; (Hopkins 54)
21In her poem, Monk reworks Hopkins’s praise of Mary as the sinless vessel of God’s grace, ‘the mediatrix of all graces’, transforming her into a figure with a material body, autonomy and agency in the incarnation and redemption of mankind. Monk goes even further by linking transubstantiation, which is central to Catholic faith, with witchcraft, suggesting that the same rituals and beliefs that underpin religious devotion can be reinterpreted as signs of heresy or deviance (’Mock transfixions. Giving up the. Ghost‘ [124]). Monk investigates how ’placement in time, social position and gender’ (‘Collaborations ’ 180) in other words positionality, shapes how narratives of power and persecution are constructed and understood.
22Morrison’s A Discoverie of Witches offers a similar examination of power dynamics to Duffy and Monk: ‘Our judicial system is still flawed. And suspicion and hostility towards the Other persist to this day; it’s only the names of the scapegoats that have changed’ (Morrison 2012, vii). In the introduction, he initially embraces the idea of witches as powerful, almost supernatural figures, but ultimately discards this image so as to better draw a parallel between the historical persecution of witches and the treatment of immigrants today, especially by the British National Party, thus shifting the focus from witches as mysterious figures of power to marginalised individuals in contemporary society, thus pointing at the construction of ‘otherness’. The poems operate redress by changing our perspective on the witches who may be just ‘dysfunctional neighbours across the street’ (viii). In other words, witches do not exist, only our very human malice does.
23Yet othering strategies can also be claimed as means of empowerment. Morrison’s 1996 version of Pendle Witches was accompanied by Paula Rego’s etchings, which further complicate the neo-historical reworking of these women‘s stories.1 Indeed, Rego’s sexualised depictions of the witches act as a form of liberation, offering an alternative to traditional portrayals that have cast them as ’old hags‘ and ’crones’ who are mere victims of the witch-hunting frenzy. In Rego‘s vision, the witches become figures of defiance and autonomy, challenging the patriarchal forces that sought to control and demonise them. There is nothing magical about them, but something political.
24Camille Ralphs also draws on intertextuality and formal experimentation to reframe the Pendle witches’ narratives. In her poetic sequence, she adopts the form of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, a collection of autobiographical epitaphs delivered by the dead citizens of a fictional small town. In Ralphs’s adaptation, the witches speak from beyond the grave to recount their lives, deaths, and the injustices they suffered in their own words as in ‘Elizabeth Sowtherns (alias Demdike)’:
A boy gnew me by a stonepit. He steemed
in th sun stone-kneading, lighting trees like wicks;
his eyes were sofd as ash, and cities hymned
and chymneyed in the atlas of his sex. (12)
25By using the epitaph form, the first person singular and her characters’ idiosyncrasies, Ralphs grants the witches agency, allowing them to assert their subjectivity in a way that history has often denied them. Evoking the life of a village through the collective voices of its deceased residents also mirrors the fragmented and multifaceted nature of historical memory, where individual stories contribute to a larger understanding of the past.
26As already suggested, intratextuality and intermediality are key features of the collections. Ralph‘s collection is illustrated by Emma Wright, who imitated the style of the woodcut of witches flying found in Mathers’ Wonders of the Invisible World (1689). It was first issued as a pamphlet before being published as a sequence in After You Were, I Am (2024). A Discoverie of Witches is presented as an expanded version in The Pendle Witches (1996), a collection illustrated by Paula Rego; while Monk’s Pendle Witch Words (2012) is a condensed version of Interregnum (1995) which had already been revised in her 2005 Selected Poems. These editorial choices tend not just to embed the palimpsestual nature of the texts into each poet’s personal body of works, but they also highlight the process of reconfiguration which is at the heart of these neo-historical collections. By working with artists and reworking their texts, the poets dismantle the idea of a single narrative and grant the careful readers the power to reassess their conceptions of witches and witch craft.
27In these neo-historical works, the Pendle witches are not just passive victims of a brutal system, but rather, through intertextuality, form, and artistic reinterpretation, they become symbols of resistance, agency, and empowerment. The use of prosopopoeia or ventriloquism (Davies 2012) takes the form of an exorcism, the eviction of the evil forces of violent history by resorting to poetic experimentation and empathy.
28Beside engaging with historical material and proposing different forms of redress, these poetic productions also draw on aesthetics and ethics of attention, between speaking for the dead and allowing them to speak for themselves, so as to elicit sympathy and empathy.
29For instance, the use of collective pronouns (‘we’ and ‘our’) in Duffy’s poem suggests collective responsibility when facing discrimination. Her admission that things may have changed since the 17th century rings ironic (‘But that was then–’). In this poem, Duffy shows sympathy for the Pendle witches who are ’like hags, unloved, an underclass, / hardly fed, unwell‘, one list of adjectives and nouns replacing the previous labels used to describe the ’Witches: female, cunning, manless, old.’ Nevertheless her witches are not given an autonomous voice (they ‘shrieked’ at best), and they are hardly individualised. In a way, they are spoken for, remaining trapped within the narratives created by others, including the poet’s. Not only does Morrison hardly give the witches an idiosyncratic voice, but he gives one to anyone involved in the trials, be they witnesses, judges or hangmen. Still, the witches speak for themselves when they are being interrogated on the stand, with the questions in italics and their answers in Roman letters, as if the law were slant and the witches straight, the text performing a visual form of typographical redress. The poems also play with misspellings on words like ‘satanick’, ‘murthers’, a portmanteau word on mother / murder, or ’to swyve‘ which suggests social intercourse. These respellings, just like the use of archaic language, such as ’acompted’ (14th century), ‘hiccocked’ (an older form of ‘hiccup’ that dates back to the 15th century), ’kilting‘ (an old form for cat, which is still used in some dialects), or the word ’arrant’ meaning ‘wandering’, are meant to criticise the language of the law for being fossilised. Yet, even if language is destabilised in a few fragments, the witches are constructed more through poetic forms than through their own voices. What Morrison does though is that he individualises them by constantly calling them by their first name—they are not considered as a group but as human beings with their own stories.
30Even though Geraldine Monk organises her collection on an alternation of thoughts and replies, she deliberately resists the ventriloquism of the Pendle witches‘ voices, acknowledging that their voices were historically suppressed by the legal language of Potts’s trial reports. Taking her distance with ’speech in a dead language‘ (Jameson 17), she explores what David Kennedy calls an ’alternative linguistic sociality’ (82), focusing on the magic utterances of the witches, which she calls ‘language magic’ (2014). The phonocentric approach to language is supposed to body forth the witches. Her collection questions the performativity of words and the systems of representation that define language—in Pendle Witch Words, the confrontational layout alternates between marked poems under their nicknames and unmarked poems under their full names. In so doing, Monk prompts the reader to listen beyond the silencing forces of historical writing. For example, Alice Nutter’s voice in Monk‘s work speaks ’through the centuries / of unrecorded silence’ (2012, 28). Rather than presenting language as a shared medium, Monk reveals it as a battleground of power, where the witches are denied autonomy in their linguistic existence and instead escape into a parallel world of their own language, from rather straightforward varieties to more cryptic ones.
Oh ma
mi maa mi mother
mUth er ing
muth rin
muR ther ing ringa
killyrhing-a. Gran. Ali. J.
killyall things bright
XXXXXXXXXXXX
killykin a killy killy-kin
ever mother mothering
(eat yer din-dins) (Monk 2012, 47)
31The many references to a matriarchal line, however dislocated, tend to rehistoricise the figure of the witch, even though it enacts ‘a form of contradictory historicity’ (Bernard 20)—the witches can be hanged, but not assimilated, by established power; they can be summoned out of historical archives but they will exorcise historical misdeeds for the present. The difficulty of reading these poems, because of the theme of bodily harm and because of orthography, is not a plea for sympathy, but a deliberate effort to transfer the pain of dislocation and fragmentation from the text to the reader, fostering empathy rather than sympathy or even pity.
32Camille Ralphs also intensifies this focus on empathy through her radical use of form and language, asserting that her work is ’meant to go too far. That‘s the point. In this case, in poems where unorthodoxy is a deliberate goal, obfuscation—as well as the ability to shock the reader, to make them question what they’re reading—is absolutely paramount’ (2016). By employing ‘free spelling’ and unorthodox poetic structures, Ralphs recalls both the unstandardised orthographies of early modern England and the contemporary Lancastrian dialect.
A boy gnew me by a stonepit. He steemed
in th sun stone-kneading, lighting trees like wicks;
his eyes were sofd as ash, and cities hymned
and chymneyed in the atlas of his sex. (2016)
33This deliberate obfuscation, Ralphs argues, is essential, as it forces readers to question what they are reading, making the poems as disorienting and unsettling as the historical injustices they depict. The first poem actually ends on the verb ’Listen‘ and this injunction is to be taken very seriously—attention is what our common humanity is about.
34These collections are grounded in history recovered from archives, or, better said, in the silences of history. They demand active engagement from the reader, not just because they reject simplistic narratives of victimhood and reconstruct the witches as figures of resilience and defiance, but also because they ask the reader to empathise with their dislocated and fragmented selves, experiencing their pain and lack of agency through the unfamiliar language. To use Leigh Wilson’s words, we read to ‘experience the way that fiction both deadens the past and imposes order on it . . . , but also to experience the truth that fiction is the only place for imagining the world other than it is’ (169). Through these reimagined voices, the poets challenge both historical and contemporary systems of power, insisting that the marginalised not only be remembered but truly heard.