Prospero's Isle by John Callow
NEW - published 15/4/25 - pre-order now
As rebel, adventurer, and religious visionary, Gerald Gardner forged Wicca upon the Isle of Man. His powerful re-imagining of modern witchcraft as a nature religion and source of female empowerment, stripped of its demonic current, was profoundly shaped by the folklore and landscape of this rugged Celtic island, set adrift in the Irish Sea.
It found its form in his writings and in the creation of The Witches’ Mill, a Manx museum devoted to the Craft, which for more than twenty years served to challenge and change popular attitudes towards the witch and her art, and to usher in a new and surprising age of tolerance to a figure that was once so bitterly feared and despised.
This modern day ‘Prospero’ had found both his Isle and his purpose, honing and defining a form of magical practice that was capable of reviving the worship of the ‘old gods’ and of inspiring feminist and environmental movements from the late Twentieth Century through to the new Millenium.
This book provides a gateway to his ideas and achievement, an insight into the genesis of a new religion that took on the mantle of the old, and to a magic that acted to dispel fear, to give delight, and to hurt not.
John Callow
John Callow is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Suffolk, who has written widely on Witchcraft and Manx History. His books include The Last Witches of England (Bloomsbury); Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft (I.B. Tauris); and (with Geoffrey Scarre) Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).
Page Count: 282
Dustjacket: Colour printed with anti-scuff matt lamination to front on 170gsm silk (FSC certified✧);
Case (Hardback): Wicotex Brillianta Charcoal with Matt Gold foil blocking to the spine;
Endpapers: 140gsm offset (FSC certified✧);
Text: 80gsm Munken Premium Cream vol 17.5 (FSC certified✧);
Plate Sections: 48 pages 150gsm matt (FSC certified✧)
Details: Section sewn, attached printed endpapers, cased in rounded black presspahn hollow spine, Brown & Oyster head and tailbands.
Size: All editions 234x156mm UK royal portrait