Crystal balls & contacting angels: predicting the future in early modern England
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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Eating the palpitating heart of a mole, sleeping with a wolf's tooth under your pillow, communicating with angels through a crystal ball. In the 16th and 17th centuries, people had many cunning methods for predicting the future. Historian Martha McGill has written a feature for BBC History magazine highlighting some extraordinary stories of early modern divination, and my colleague Ellie Cawthorne caught up with her to find out more. Lovely to have you here, Martha, talking about a very exciting topic today, fortune telling.
Why might people turn to a fortune teller in the early modern period. So we're talking about the 16th and 17th centuries mainly here. Sure. So this is a particularly chaotic period of history.
You've got a lot of major and dramatic events going on. In the 17th century you've got periods of civil warfare, you've got outbreaks of plague, you've got famine. There's an awful lot of uncertainties to life, essentially. People had relatively short lifespans as well. People
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