Review: Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 31 August 2018 – 6 January 2019

Abstract

‘Could you stab the image of a loved one?’ This is one of six questions posed by Sophie Page and Marina Wallace, the two lead curators of Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, intended to prompt visitors to ‘explore the place of magical thinking in our lives, and to connect this to magical thinking in the past’. In drawing an emotive correspondence between a person and a surrogate, it is a question that strikes at the heart of one of the exhibition’s key aims, an aim shared with the Leverhulme-funded project that enabled it: to historicize identity and subjectivity in light of emotional experience and supernatural belief.