Supernatural publications by ISI History Prof

ISI’s History of Florence professor, Simon Young, has continued his publications on nineteenth- and twentieth-century superstitions, witchcraft, and fairy belief (with particular attention to the nasty kind of fairy). This year’s crop of articles includes a long piece on the collision of traditional belief and theosophy, published in Folklore; a series of micro-histories on changeling belief (baby stealing) in Victorian and Edwardian Cornwall, in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall; and an article on digitization and traditional lore in the chief Irish folklore journal, Beascna. This summer’s work has involved a trawl through overlooked sources from north-western England with particular attention given to mentions of boggarts (Lancashire trolls) in dialect literature and dialect theater. The first of these articles to be published will be, ‘Shantooe Jest: A Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Fairy Saga’ in Supernatural Studies. Simon Young’s work in 2014 will be dedicated to research into the fascinating and duplicitous American Florentine, Charles Godfrey Leland, his part in the international community in Florence in the 1800s, and his writings on Tuscan witchcraft.