![Malcolm Gaskill Headshot 2021](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Malcolm_Gaskill_Headshot_2021.jpg)
Malcolm John Gaskill
FRHistS
The Royal Historical Society, founded in 1868, is a learned society of the United Kingdom which advances scholarly studies of history.
Origins
The society was founded and received its royal charter in 1868. Until 1872 it was known as the Histori ...
(born 22 April 1967) is an English academic historian and writer on crime,
magic
Magic or Magick most commonly refers to:
* Magic (supernatural), beliefs and actions employed to influence supernatural beings and forces
* Ceremonial magic, encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic
* Magical thinking, the belief that unrela ...
,
witchcraft
Witchcraft traditionally means the use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others. A practitioner is a witch. In medieval and early modern Europe, where the term originated, accused witches were usually women who were believed to have ...
,
spiritualism
Spiritualism is the metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and Mind-body dualism, dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century, Spiritualism (w ...
, and the
supernatural. Gaskill was a professor in the history department of the
University of East Anglia
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...
from 2011 until 2020, when he retired from teaching to give more time to writing.
Early life
Born in Suffolk, Gaskill grew up in Kent. He was educated at
Rainham Mark Grammar School
Rainham Mark Grammar School (previously Known as Gillingham Technical High School) is the only co-educational selective grammar school in the Medway, Kent, England area. It has academy status, along with Twydall Primary School and Riverside Pri ...
and
Robinson College, Cambridge
Robinson College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1977, it is one of the newest Oxbridge colleges and is unique in having been intended, from its inception, for both undergraduate and graduate students of bo ...
, reading History and graduating Ph.D. with a thesis on early modern England supervised by
Keith Wrightson.
Career
Gaskill was briefly at
Keele University
Keele University, officially known as the University of Keele, is a public research university in Keele, approximately from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as the University College of North Staffordshire, Keele ...
as a lecturer for the year 1993–1994, and then at
Queen’s University Belfast
, mottoeng = For so much, what shall we give back?
, top_free_label =
, top_free =
, top_free_label1 =
, top_free1 =
, top_free_label2 =
, top_free2 =
, established =
, closed =
, type = Public research university
, parent = ...
for the next academic year, before spending four years at
Anglia Ruskin University
Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) is a public university in East Anglia, United Kingdom. Its origins are in the Cambridge School of Art, founded by William John Beamont in 1858. It became a university in 1992, and was renamed after John Ruskin in ...
. After that, he joined
Churchill College, Cambridge, as a fellow and as Director of History Studies. In 2007, he transferred as a lecturer to the School of History of the
University of East Anglia
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...
, where he was appointed as a professor in 2011.
[Malcolm Gaskill]
"DIARY On Quitting Academia"
'' London Review of Books'', Vol. 42, No. 18, 24 September 2020, accessed 17 December 2022
In 2010, he was a visiting fellow in North American studies at the British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
, while researching his book ''Between Two Worlds''.
Gaskill’s academic interests are in the cultural and social history of Britain and North America, especially the history of crime, magic, and witchcraft, between 1500 and 1800, and in 20th-century spiritualism
Spiritualism is the metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and Mind-body dualism, dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century, Spiritualism (w ...
and supernatural phenomena, with a focus on psychical research
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near- ...
from 1920 to 1950. He has written chiefly about the history of witchcraft and witch-hunts.[
His book ''Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy'' (2006) is a study of the witch-hunts of 1645–1647 in East Anglia.][
While at the University of East Anglia, Gaskill was available to supervise research students interested in social and cultural history in the early modern period in England, especially on topics related to witchcraft and mentalities.]["Malcolm Gaskill"]
uea.ac.uk, accessed 17 December 2022
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' called Gaskill’s ''The Ruin of All Witches'' (2021), about a real life witch hunt in Springfield, Massachusetts, "a riveting history of life in a 17th-century New England frontier town", noting that a man’s nightmare had led to his being accused of witchcraft, flowing out of the colonists’ isolation stress, disease, and death.
In 2022, the book was shortlisted for a Wolfson History Prize
The Wolfson History Prizes are literary awards given annually in the United Kingdom to promote and encourage standards of excellence in the writing of history for the general public. Prizes are given annually for two or three exceptional works ...
, with the judges calling it "a riveting micro-history, brilliantly set within the broader cultural and social history of witchcraft." By this time, Gaskill was a full-time writer.
Retirement
In 2018, his wife accepted a job in Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...
and he was able to take a year out to look after their children, finding that he did not miss academic life. In May 2020, during the first Covid-19 lockdown
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of non-pharmaceutical interventions colloquially known as lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, and similar societal restrictions) have been implemented in numerous countrie ...
, Gaskill settled his early retirement from his teaching position, noting that universities were already "far from the sunlit uplands" and that they seemed to be about to "descend into a dark tunnel". His retirement was complete a few months later, and he explained his disillusion in an article in '' London Review of Books''.
Books
*''Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches'' (Fourth Estate, April 2001)
*''The Matthew Hopkins Trials'', ed. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003: vol. 3 in James Sharpe and Richard M. Golden, eds., ''Writings on English Witchcraft 1560-1736'', 6 vols.
*''Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England'' (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
*''Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy'' (John Murray Press, April 2006; Harvard University Press, October 2007)
*''Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction'' (Oxford University Press, 2010)
*''Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans'' (Basic Civitas Books, 2013; Oxford University Press, 2014)
*''The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World'' (London: Allen Lane, November 2021)
Some other publications
* "Witchcraft and power in early modern England: the case of Margaret Moore" in ''Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England'' (Routledge, 1994) 125-145
* "Witches and witchcraft prosecutions, 1560-1660" in M. Zell, ed., ''Early Modern Kent 1540-1640'' (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000) 245-277
* "Witchcraft" in Arthur F. Kinney, David W. Swain, Eugene D. Hill, eds., ''Tudor England: An Encyclopaedia'' (Garland Publishing, 2000)
* "Witches and Witnesses in old and New England" in S. Clark, ed., ''Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture'' (Macmillan, 2001) 55-80 26 p
* "Time's Arrows: Context and Anachronism in the History of Mentalities" in ''Scientia Poetica'' 10 (December 2006), 237-253
* "Witchcraft, Politics and Memory in Seventeenth-Century England" in ''The Historical Journal
''The Historical Journal'', formerly known as ''The Cambridge Historical Journal'', is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. It publishes approximately thirty-five articles per year on all aspects of British, ...
'' 50, 2 (June 2007), 289-308
* "Witchcraft and evidence in early modern England" in ''Past and Present'' 198 (2008), 33-70
* "Witchcraft, emotion and imagination in the English civil war" in J. Newton, J. Bath, eds., ''Witchcraft and the Act of 1604'' (Brill, 2008)
* "The Pursuit of Reality: Recent research into the reality of witchcraft" in ''The Historical Journal'' 51, 4 (December 2008), 1069–1088
* "Masculinity and witchcraft in seventeenth-century England" in A. Rowlands, ed., ''Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe'' (Palgrave, 2009)
* "Fear made flesh: the English witch-panic of 1645-7" in D. Lemmings, C. Walker, eds., ''Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England'' (Palgrave, 2009)
* "Witchcraft and Neighbourliness in Early Modern England" in S. Hindle, ed., ''Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England'' (2013)
* "Little commonwealths II: communities" in K. Wrightson, ed., ''A Social History of England, 1500-1700'' (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
* "Afterword: Passions in Perspective" in L. Kounine, M. Ostling, eds., ''Emotions in the History of Witchcraft'' (Basingstoke: Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, 2017), 269–279
* "The Fear and Loathing of Witches" in S. Page, M. Wallace, eds., ''Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft'' (Ashmolean Museum, 2018)
Honours
*Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
The Royal Historical Society, founded in 1868, is a learned society of the United Kingdom which advances scholarly studies of history.
Origins
The society was founded and received its royal charter in 1868. Until 1872 it was known as the Histori ...
[Bill Thompson]
"Between Two Worlds"
''The Post and Courier
''The Post and Courier'' is the main daily newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina. It traces its ancestry to three newspapers, the ''Charleston Courier'', founded in 1803, the ''Charleston Daily News'', founded 1865, and ''The Evening Post'', f ...
'', 8 November 2014, accessed 7 January 2023
Notes
External links
*Malcolm Gaskill
Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England: Contents, Introduction
(Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer.
Cambridge University Pre ...
, 2000)
*
"Witchcraft"
(''In Our Time'', 21 October 2004), BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...
, with Alison Rowlands, Lyndal Roper and Malcolm Gaskill
"Witchcraft Expert Malcolm Gaskill Breaks Down Famous Witches in Films & TV"
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gaskill, Malcolm
1967 births
Academics of Anglia Ruskin University
Academics of Queen's University Belfast
Academics of the University of East Anglia
Alumni of Robinson College, Cambridge
Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge
Historians of witchcraft
Living people
People educated at Rainham Mark Grammar School
Fellows of the Royal Historical Society
English non-fiction writers