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

County Antrim, Ireland, 1711: Eight women were put on trial accused of bewitching and demonically possessing young Mary Dunbar, amid an attack by evil spirits on the local community and after the supernatural murder of a 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 dabbled in magic, they smoked, they drank, they had disabilities. A second trial targeted a final male ‘witch’ and head of the Sellor ‘witch family’. With echoes of the Salem witch-hunt, this is a story of murder, of a community in crisis and of how the witchhunts that claimed over 50,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores. It plunges the reader into a world where magic was real and the power of the Devil felt, with disastrous consequences.

About the Author :
Dr ANDREW SNEDDON (BA Hons, MLitt, PhD, FHEA) is a lecturer in history at the University of Ulster. Originally from Scotland, Dr Sneddon pursued his post-graduate and post-doctoral research at the University of St Andrews, Lancaster University and Queen's University, Belfast. He has also worked as an archivist at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), and taught history at Queen's University, Belfast and Glasgow University. Dr Sneddon is the leading expert on the history of Irish witchcraft and magic and has published widely in leading, international academic journals, as well as edited collections, in the fields of British and Irish early modern social, medical and political history (c.1550-1800). In addition to presenting papers at academic conferences (both national and international), he gives talks to local community, heritage and educational groups, and is working with leading practitioners to turn his books into museum exhibitions, graphic novels, VR apps, and video games.

Review :
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.’ ‘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’