"Grandmother" (poem)

No abstract available

Folk belief and Scottish traditional literatures

No abstract available

Scots in Australia: the gaze from Auld Scotia

No abstract available

The (super)natural worlds of Robert Kirk: fairies, beasts, landscapes and lychnobious liminalities

No abstract available

Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland by Martha McGill

Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland. By Martha McGill. Scottish Historical Review Monograph Series. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018. Hardcover. 255 pp. ISBN 978-1-78327-362-1. $90.00

About a bear: wildlife tourism in the Polar North

No abstract available

Witch belief in Scottish coastal communities

Scottish witchcraft historiography has tended to focus its attention on inland Lowland agricultural regions and farming communities. However, coastal regions and fishing villages seem also to have contributed more than their fair share of witch suspects during the era of the witch-hunts and beyond. Drawing on a select sample of witchcraft cases, confessions, and folk narratives this article asks if there was anything distinctive about witches from Scottish coastal communities, in comparison with those from inland areas? It also proposes a new categorization of the Scottish witch figure, that of the elemental witch, particularly skilled in the manipulation of the natural world, the weather and produce of the sea

The survival of witchcraft prosecutions and witch belief in South West Scotland

During the era of the Scottish witch-hunts, Dumfries and Galloway was one of the last regions to initiate witch prosecutions, but it was also one of the most reluctant to completely surrender all belief in witches until a comparatively late date. In the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries south-west Scotland, better known for the persecution of covenanters, took the practice of witchcraft and charming very seriously indeed, and for perhaps longer than other parts of Scotland, though the area has received surprisingly little scholarly investigation. The trial evidence is not incompatible with that found elsewhere though there is less demonic content. Accusations of witchcraft in this region were mostly concerned with the troubles of everyday life, agricultural problems, family tensions and disagreements between neighbours. From 1670 to about 1740, the very decades that were giving birth to the Scottish Enlightenment, learned interest in the supernatural was actually on the increase and the topic received an unprecedented level of questioning, investigation, and scrutiny. Ironically, the ‘superstitions’ that both church and state had been attempting to eradicate for some two hundred years were now being used to defend religion against the growing threat of atheism. The zeal of the ministers does seem to have contributed to the endurance of witch beliefs in the South West, as elsewhere. Against this backdrop, the survival of witch belief and the continued prosecution of witches in southwest Scotland is examined, thus contributing to our understanding of the individualistic nature of witch persecution and the various dynamics at play within the Scottish witch-hunting experience

Getting shot of elves: healing, witchcraft and fairies in the Scottish witchcraft trials

This paper re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with "elf-shot." Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationship of these beliefs to witchcraft itself

The guid neighbours : fairy belief in early modern Scotland, 1500-1800

This thesis investigates fairy belief in early modern Scotland (1500-1800), and aims to reach some conclusions as to what it meant to those who held this belief. Many people in the early modern period believed in fairies; this can be conjectured through the documentation available to us. They were a part of everyday life, as real to people as the sunrise, and as incontrovertible as the existence of God. While fairy belief was only a fragment of a much larger complex of beliefs, the implications of studying this belief tradition are potentially vast. Through the study of folk beliefs one can begin to understand the worldview of the people who lived in these centuries, and we are led one step closer to a comprehension of the past. -- The sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented assault on fairy belief, and folk culture generally. The religious impetus, both Protestant and Catholic, to remodel the world, subjected the fairies to a process of demonization. Belief in fairies is seen against a background of suppression and the attempted extirpation of folk culture. -- Through the use of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, this thesis examines the nature of fairy belief, the major themes and motifs, the attack upon the tradition, and the attempted reinstatement of such beliefs. The stance that has been taken, for the purposes of this thesis, is that it does not matter whether or not fairies existed but that the people under study believed in their existence