Giving voice to the victims of the Orkney witchcraft trials: 'Answered, she spoke it for weakness of her owne flesh, and for feare of her lyfe'

How do you lift up marginalized voices so they can be heard? And more challenging still, what if those voices have been silenced for 400 years? ‘The Witch Experience’ project aimed to make the voices of Scottish women and men accused of witchcraft sound again. The project focused on the local context of the Orkney Islands, an archipelago off the north coast of Scotland, where at least 70 persons were accused of witchcraft between 1594 and 1708. In Scotland, a law forbidding the use of witchcraft, portraying yourself as having magical powers, or enlisting a witch to perform magic for you was passed by the parliament of Mary Queen of Scots in 1563. But it was not until the 1590s that the prosecution of witches became prevalent in Scotland, when King James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) caused a panic, firstly by claiming that he and his Danish bride had been victims of storm-raising witches, and secondly by writing a book, Daemonology, explaining what witches do, how they derive powers from the Devil, and how they should be caught and punished. The witchcraft trials in Scotland prevailed throughout the 17th and early 18th century, but eventually, in 1736, the law prescribing the death penalty for witchcraft was repealed (Hutton, 2018; Willumsen, 2013). Edinburgh University’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft recorded 3837 persons accused of witchcraft in Scotland through the whole period (Goodare et al., 2003). The Orkney witchcraft trials were an arm of the Scottish panic, the islands being ruled at the time by a first cousin of the king, Earl Patrick Stewart. The Scottish panic was itself an arm of the wider European panic, which had started in the 15th century (Hutton, 2018).