VIRTUAL LECTURE | The Ruin of All Witches: Fear, Fury & False Accusations With Dr. Malcolm Gaskill

Thursday, October 23, 12 pm

This is a virtual lecture. Zoom link will be provided in advance of the event. 

WDS Director of Preservation & Collections TR Hamilton and distinguished historian Dr. Malcolm Gaskill moderate a group discussion looking at the process through which Dr. Gaskill came to write his 2022 work “A Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World”.  Gaskill’s work utilizes previously unexplored sources to examine 17th-century New England witchcraft trials through the lens of one specific Connecticut River Valley community in 1651. Attendees are encouraged to participate and come ready with questions.

Tickets: Members $10 | General Admission $15 | Book Club Members Free

Bio | Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia, specializing in the social and cultural history of 17th-century England and America, particularly the history of witchcraft.

He is the author of six books, including Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches, a biography of the spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, the last woman imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act in 1944.

His most recent book is The Ruin of all Witches: Life and Death in the New World, the story of a witch-panic in a New England frontier town, published by Penguin, Allen Lane.

He is also interested in war and memory in the twentieth century, about which he has written about for the TLS and London Review of Books. This is also a key theme of Hellish Nell, a revised edition of which is underway.