ZOOM TICKET- Simon Young- Mary Doheny: a 19th-century fairy resurrectionist

ZOOM TICKET OPTION- please book before 3pm and the link will be emailed to you then.

This is an in-person event for the audience; Simon will be joining us to deliver his talk from Italy via Zoom. This is such an excellent opportunity to hear Simon speak and to ask him all your questions regarding fairy lore- he has extensive knowledge of this subject! We're expecting some great discussion after his examination of a fascinating case....

In 1864 Mary Doheny a Tipperary ‘fairy woman’ announced that she could resurrect the dead. Mary had discovered that human spirits resided with fairies in the local landscape. You have your doubts? Mary was even able to bring some neighbours face to face with dead family members. For three months, before the local forces of law and order intervened, Mary led negotiations with the good folk...

Simon Young, born just over the county border from Todmorden, trained as a medievalist and, after several years living in Spain, completed his doctorate at the University of Florence in 2006, magna cum laude. His early written work concerned Irish ecclesiastical influence on the continent and British settlement in north-western Spain. In 2005 and 2006 he brought out two historical novels with Weidenfeld and Nicolson.. He teaches usually on contemporary Italian, religious and food history. In the early 2010s he changed his study focus and decided to write on supernatural beliefs and he has since put together scores of articles on that subject for peer-reviewed journals. His eighth and ninth books are The Boggart: Folklore, History, Placenames and Dialect (Exeter University Press 2022) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (Mississippi University Press 2022). The Boggart was runner up for the Katharine Briggs Prize and was given Honorable Mention for the Wayland Hand Prize. He is also co-editor (with Davide Ermacora) of the monograph series Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Beliefs. He believes passionately in viewpoint diversity in academia and, to that end, he is a member of the Heterodox Academy.