Creating a fearful panic in society can aid the entrenchment of power and the witchcraft frenzy could also be used to settle old scores, enrich individuals at the expense of others and keep women subordinate to men. It balances magic and realism perfectly in reframing the Scottish Witch Trials for its modern readership. Doctor Fagan’s stance is supposedly against patriarchy, power structures and established systems but she otherwise bears down upon the sixteenth century with an almost imperialistic fervour. Fagan offers a simple yet very effective way in which to explore how and why women are still discriminated against almost 450 years later.

Iris tells Geillis about some of the awful things done to women today and she refers to the two Met officers who took photographs of two murdered sisters. However as they learn more of just how mirrored their lives are, even when hundreds of years apart leaves the lingering shadow of a fearsome king’s insecurities echoing throughout history, both shall find shelter in each other as more of their lives are revealed to truly be intertwined both in this life, and the next. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.The second is the more recent, feminist one in which the witch is now glamorously peripheral, a poster child for alternative lifestyles and, inevitably, a martyr to the envious narrow-mindedness of the majority.

Tough and calm, electrifying and intent, it is an intelligent and deeply literary novel which deals its hope and hopelessness simultaneously with a humaneness, both urgent and timeless, rooted in real narrative subtlety. If you are trying to deny having any magical knowledge, it is probably best not to give a public speech in a language from four-hundred years in the future. In other words, Hex cannot be tasked with historical verisimilitude because it is meant to be set in a world of talking crows and astral projection and the ready insubstantiality of the postmodern aesthetic. She goes on to comment: ‘Travelled time all my life’, and then: ‘Five hundred years between us, Geillis Duncan – it’s such a little leap really.It raises th Why not give an amnesty to every Covenanter, Royalist, Jacobite or, indeed, Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for blasphemy which might well have been some silly undergraduate humour?