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Possessed By the Devil : Possessed By the Devil: The History of the Islandmagee Witch Trials, 1711 - ANDREW SNEDDON

Possessed By the Devil

Possessed By the Devil: The History of the Islandmagee Witch Trials, 1711

By: ANDREW SNEDDON

Paperback | 12 August 2025

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In 1711, in County Antrim, eight women were put on trial accused of orchestrating the demonic possession of young Mary Dunbar, and the haunting and supernatural murder of a local clergyman's wife. Mary Dunbar was the star witness in this trial, and the women were, by the standards of the time, believable witches - they smoked, they drank, they just did not look right. With echoes of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and the Salem witch-hunt, this is a story of murder, of hysteria, and of how the 'witch craze' that claimed over 40,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores. AUTHOR: Dr Andrew Sneddon has a BA (hons) in History and Literature from the University of Hertfordshire and and M.Litt in Historical Research from the University of St Andrews, with a dissertation on English witchcraft, 1586-1718. His PhD was awarded by Lancaster University for a thesis on witchcraft writer, 'improver', and religious controversialist, Bishop Francis Hutchinson (1660-1739). Towards the end of this research he taught early modern history and study skills at the University of Glasgow. He then became an archivist at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), before being appointed Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust funded, Irish Legislation Project, at Queen's University, Belfast. In 2007, he was appointed Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, to explore eighteenth-century institutional medicine. The following year, he joined the history department of the University of Ulster, Coleraine as lecturer. He has given papers and invited lectures all over the world and has published widely. 8 b/w illustrations
Industry Reviews

Praise for first edition:

'Possessed by the devil is erudite, accessible and very readable. Sneddon meticulously embeds his story in its wider British and European context as it unfolds, and brings a great deal of scholarship to bear on his tale ... as both a very good read and a genuinely fascinating (and overdue) excursion into Irish cultural history, it can be highly recommended.'

-- Dr Johnn Gibney * History Ireland *

'Andrew Sneddon is bidding fair to become the leading expert on the trials for witchcraft in early modern Ireland ... Irish trials were, famously, few. That at Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in 1711, provoked by events on nearby Islandmagee, was the largest of them ... It is also one of the best-documented in the British Isles ... These qualities make it a very suitable subject for a book-length case- study, which Sneddon now richly provides'

-- Prof. Ronald Hutton * Irish Historical Studies *

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