Bøker av Jeremy Harte

What is it like to meet a being from another world? This book collects testimony from eight hundred years of witnesses baffled by the supernatural breaking into their lives. Close reading of miracle collections, chronicles, saints lives and sermons shows how they depended on first-hand vernacular voices, never quite suppressed in the Latin of the clergymen who transcribed them. When people saw spirits, surface identity mattered less than common nature. Whether manifesting as fairies, revenants, local saints or fiends, they came in stock types: goblins, lovers, hunters, pygmies, dogs, indescribable shape-shifting objects. Just as they had preferred forms, so they appeared in particular places. The tradition of English supernatural place-names, never before gathered into a corpus, matches the medieval texts to show what places were haunted and why. The dark pools into which otherworldly things were exorcised, the paths on which they led travellers astray, the hills onto which they descended in search of people to command and seduce, and the meadows where they danced- all these can be found on the cognitive map of the peasantry. This book sheds new light on anomalous experience in medieval life and the relations it forged between vernacular life-stories and the gate-keepers of the written word. Fairies could cure as well as harm, prophecy as well as deceive: that made them a disruptive force in history, theology and morals. They challenge our ideas of a church-dominated society and once they are admitted into the picture, the Middle Ages will never look the same.

An accessible history of the Roma people in England told from the inside. The Romany people have been variously portrayed as exotic strangers or as crude, violent, delinquent "gypsies." For the first time, this book describes the real history of the Romany in England from the inside. Drawing on new archival and first-hand research, Jeremy Harte vividly describes the itinerant life of the Romany as well as their artistic traditions, unique language, and flamboyant ceremonies. Travelers through Time tells the dramatic story of Romany life on the British margins from Tudor times through today, filled with vivid insights into the world of England's large Romany population.

Epsom and Ewell have been attracting visitors since Henry VIII built his lost Palace of Nonsuch in the Surrey countryside. Known worldwide as the home of the Derby and Epsom Salts, the district has sheltered many strange characters, from a clergyman who campaigned for polygamy to a Prime Minister who valued horses before politics. Epsom was a spa town in the days of Charles II, and its assembly rooms and mansion houses still echo to the tread of elegant ghosts. On the windswept Downs, nine successive grandstands have let royalty and riffraff view the world's greatest horse race, never forgotten in a town where every fifth pub is named after a racehorse. The Gothic turrets of Epsom College, the gaunt towers of five mental hospitals, and the yews and cedars of Victorian gardens mark out a landscape where the outer edge of London's suburbs gives way to fields and woods.