It’s 1612 and a woman is in court. She was accused of killing three men through witchcraft. She gets a confession that she denies, and then a girl is tricked into testifying against her. When the woman yelled at her in despair, the girl burst into tears and the woman was taken back to the dungeon.
Once the girl has her audience, she jumps on the table and calmly denounces the woman as a witch. She is the woman’s biological daughter and she is nine years old. Jennet Device is a key witness in a trial that will lead to the execution of 10 people, including all members of her own family. But twenty years later, Janet herself would stand trial for the same crime.
Janet, a 9-year-old beggar, is part of a larger story – the judge, the priest and the doctor, even the king himself. The most disturbing witch trials of all time.
This is a story about fear, politics, religion, science and magic. But it’s also about words and stories and how powerful they can be. The two trials that shape this little girl’s life are emblematic of a larger story – the transition between the pre-modern world and the supposed age of reason. Yet our fear of evil never really goes away…nor, some say, the evil itself.
Fear of evil was common in England 400 years ago when King James I came to the throne. After the Gunpowder Plot, James lived in fear of a Catholic rebellion. He had just arrived from Scotland and had taken the throne in a strange land, and some parts of his new kingdom were particularly disturbing.
