The Christmas Witches
Europe boasts an astonishing collection of Christmas witches who emerge from the winter shadows, beings like the Alpine witch Perchta, who goes house-to-house over the Christmas season and will slit open the bellies of any badly behaved children she encounters, pulling out their guts, stuffing them with straw and sewing them back up again with a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread. This talk will examine the history of these creatures – how they blended with the strangeness and darkness that was characteristic of the Christmas season until the Victorians sanitised it; how they were originally ambiguous figures – dangerous but thought to bring luck and good fortune to the houses they visited; how they were part monster, part Fate and part fairy, full of dreams of female freedom and power; and how they were turned into something utterly horrific, and used as a template for the witch trials of early modernity.
Speaker Bio:
Sarah Clegg is a Sunday Times bestselling author on the history of folklore. Her most recent book, The Dead of Winter, traced the origins and changing lore of the dark side of Christmas. Sarah has a PhD in ancient history from the University of Cambridge and works in publishing.
Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
Image: Wikimedia Commons, Holger Uwe Schmitt.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
