As stated in the last blog Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled ‘witch-finder general’ of the 1640s was one of the ‘horror episodes’ for the current evening class. Hopkins (1620-1647) was the fourth son of a puritan church minister from Essex. Between 1643 and 1647 (during the chaos of the First Civil War) he oversaw the ‘discovery’ and execution of over 300 women, charging the local parish vestry for his services. Occasional execution of witches had been no new thing over past centuries, and further were to follow Hopkin’s death, but the scale of the activity in the 1640s was unprecedented. Witches supposedly had a ‘devil’s mark’ somewhere on their body whereby their ‘familiars’ (basically pet animals) sucked blood so Hopkins employed ‘pickers’, women who searched the revealed skin of the hapless victims. Why choose this episode for the theme of horror? Apart from the fact that it represents a centuries-old notion that the female sex was to be viewed with suspicion and caution, this fuelled by ignorance of female biology and reinforced by certain Biblical texts, it represents the horror of being an innocent victim of state-supported bigotry, to be devoid of recourse in law and to be subjected to an horrific death.
For another example of the horror of being a helpless victim child rape was chosen, the case study chosen being the childhood of Maya Angelou as told in her frank autobiography (although I have not been able to identify the exact text).
What of nightmares, exampling the power of the mind to construct story-lines which, although reflecting some episodes from memory, bring to the fore the fearful insecurities of life.
The image above is a 17th century print showing Hopkins entering the home of two witches who seem to be telling him about their ‘familiars’. An horrific image in many respects.