Ipswich Witch

Mary Lackland and the Suffolk Witch Hunts

Against the backdrop of the largest witch hunt in English history, this book is both an investigation of a miscarriage of justice over 350 years old and a recreation of East Anglia as it once was. Ipswich, faced by the extreme challenges of war, religious dissent, poverty, sickness, and the threat of foreign invasion, became an ideological battlefield during the civil wars. As Puritanism struggled against Catholic sensibilities, the Devil loomed at the door of every English home, and the age of the witchfinder was born. This book aims to challenge some of our stereotypes of the period, and to show how witch hunts reflect the growth in Puritan sects, gender politics, the exploitation of the poor, the importance of beliefs in the occult, and the rise of English power in the New World.