Preternature V3:1: Capturing Witches

This special issue of Preternature, “Capturing Witches,” comes out of a three-day international conference held at Lancaster University on August 17–19, 2012, to commemorate the lives of the ten people convicted of witchcraft at the Lancaster Witch Trials and executed on Lancaster Moor on Thursday, August 20, 1612. Over the last four hundred years, from words spoken in courtrooms or on stage or written on paper, to images and sculptures, interactive websites and reenactments in Lancaster Castle and on Pendle Hill, witches have been captured rhetorically and artistically to entertain, teach, amuse, and shock readers and listeners. The articles collected here take up the central question of “Capturing Witches” by means of word, image, and song, and examine it as a live issue in both historical and transhistorical forms.