The Witches in Early Modern England project, led by Kirsten C. Uszkalo, designs and deploys strategically intersecting, innovative, and experimental digital tools to allow for robust searching and pattern finding within the corpus of texts relating to early modern witchcraft. Beyond that, its open-ended platform encourages further expansion by users, to push the limits of how digital technologies can enhance and inspire the academic interrogation of existing corpora.
WEME is a digital exploration of the nano-histories: a way to study the history of early English witching. Using WEME’s resources, you can use a time line, map, search box, or filter to explore almost three thousand individual multi-dimensional nano-histories of and align them, using digital technologies, to create a composite of the true and terrible stories of the early English witches.
Part reading / part seeing, WEME uses the metaphor or a stack of cards to magnify individual experiences. You can hover over the card stacks to see the content, click on the one you want, and click on the cards to see the information in the nano-history there – a mini-biography of the witch, a biography of her familiar, the event she was involved in, who else was there, what law was in effect, where the event happen, and what text it is recorded in – all you need to know to see if this moment of witching is relevant to your study. If you would like to keep the nano-history, drag the card into the basket and email it to yourself.
WEME traces the ‘real’ events, people, and preternatural beings recorded in printed witch-texts, medical manuals, and legal archives, and represents them as cells within the arterial witch-beliefs that stream rapidly and organically through the text, the body, and the land.
You have arrived at the WEME development site. Welcome.