Recasting the Bygone Witch: Representations of Lesser-Known Witches in Popular Culture

'Recasting the Bygone Witch: Representations of Lesser-Known Witches in Popular Culture' is an interdisciplinary collection that explores witches across time, culture, and scholarly space. It brings together voices and perspectives from literature, game studies, political science, history, and more to examine the overlooked or misrepresented. Timely and profoundly relevant, the collection asks readers to participate in conversations about the bygone witch as a historical, cultural, and political figure while examining who gets remembered or labeled as a witch, and why.
'Recasting the Bygone Witch' features scholarship from an interdisciplinary, international cohort of scholars using a variety of methods to analyze and contextualize bygone witches in discussions of power, identity, and resistance. From biographical examinations of Pamela Colman Smith, Marjorie Cameron, Sybil Leek, and Urška Klakočar Zupančič, to art and literary analyses of The Fires of Bride, Thomas Middleton, and William Hogarth, and reimagining the witch’s presence in college classrooms, scholars place the bygone witch in conversation across disciplines. The collection also examines how witches manifest in popular culture, specifically the depiction of witches in (and on) social media, video games, and film.
With a blend of rigorous research and accessible examples of bygone witches across socio-cultural spaces, 'Recasting the Bygone Witch: Representations of Lesser-Known Witches in Popular Culture' is an act of reclamation and preservation.

List of Figures
Introduction: The Witch of Pungo

Case studies
Chapter One
“Goddaughter of a witch and sister to a fairy”: Pamela Colman Smith, representation of the woman mystic, and the periodical press in the early twentieth century
Marion Tempest Grant
York University, Toronto, Canada
Chapter Two
Professional witch: Sybil Leek and the rise of public witchcraft
Candace U. Grissom
University of North Georgia
Chapter Three
The Children and The Wormwood Star: Marjorie Cameron’s reproductive collaborations with the goddess Babalon
Sandra Huber
Concordia University
Chapter Four
The Red Heels Affair: Women in politics, modern-day witches?
Julija Šuligoj
University of Ljubljana

Literary and visual analysis
Chapter Five
Witchy women and subversive sisterhood: From Hogarth’s Harlot to Blake’s Whore of Babylon
Debra Bourdeau
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Chapter Six
The complicated craft of The Witch
Kara McCabe
Emerson College
Chapter Seven
The work of a witch: flourishing in the queer joy of fulfilling labor in Ellen Galford’s The Fires of Bride
Corvin Bittner
University of Augsburg
Chapter Eight
‘The witched Sycorax’: Classrooms as covens for anticolonial demonology
Sara A. Rich
Rhode Island School of Design Popular culture
Chapter Nine
The mechanical witch: Playing the witch
Yaochong Joe Yang
Trent University
Giovanni Tagliamonte
Independent Scholar
Chapter Ten
“And they were broommates”: Sapphic WitchTok and its effects on practice and representation
Khirsten Doolan
Northwestern State University of Louisiana
Chapter Eleven
Rotten milk, poisoned bodies: The vibrant matter of the necrotic witch in Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse
Alex Hall
Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto

Conclusion
About the Contributors
Index

Aíne Murphy Norris is a Ph.D. candidate at Old Dominion University and holds a B.A. (2004) and M.A. (2016) from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her culturally-based research includes circus and sideshow, oddities in popular culture, and the archival examination of lore and the occult using mixed-method technologies. Her research uncovering new details about circus aerialist Eva Clark was featured in the 'Cincinnati Enquirer,' 'The News Virginian,' and as a television feature. Norris was awarded the 2025 Popular Culture Association William M. Jones Award for her stylometric work un-masking a 19th century Appalachian witchcraft accuser. Read more at ainenorris.info

Mariaelena DiBenigno received her Ph.D. from William & Mary (2020) after completing her M.A. at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2011). Her research encompasses folklore, geography, and literature, exploring the relationship between popular culture, public history, and the haunting power of place. She has worked with several historic sites, including the Mariners’ Museum Library and the Menokin Foundation, and instructed courses for W&M and the National Institute of American History and Democracy. Most recently, Mariaelena was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at James Monroe’s Highland in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Cross-disciplinary humanities, digital humanities, literary criticism, coven, sisterhood, professional magic, goddess, American Studies