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
