Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic

Tabitha Stanmore transports us to a time when magic was used to navigate life's challenges and solve problems of both trivial and deadly importance.

About the event

In Cunning Folk, historian Tabitha Stanmore transports readers to a time when magic was used day-to-day as a way to navigate life’s challenges and to solve problems of both trivial and deadly importance. In this talk you’ll meet lovelorn widows and dissolute nobles, selfless healers and renegade monks.

Charming in every sense of the word, Cunning Folk is an immersive reconstruction of a bygone world and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.

Additional information

This event will take place in our first floor ‘Gallery’ space which is accessed via a narrow 22-step staircase with a handrail. Unfortunately it is not wheelchair accessible.

About the speaker

Tabitha Stanmore is a social historian of magic and witchcraft at the University of Exeter. She is part of the Leverhulme-funded Seven County Witch-Hunt Project, and her doctoral thesis was published as Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. She has featured on Radio 3’s Free Thinking and BBC 4’s Plague Fiction, and her writing has been published in the Conversation.