Emma Wilby

Emma Wilby is a British historian and author specialising in the magical beliefs of Early Modern Britain.

An honorary fellow in history at the University of Exeter, England, she has published two books examining witchcraft and the cunning folk of this period. In these, she has identified what she considers to be shamanic elements within the popular beliefs that were held in this place and time, which she believes influenced magical thought and the concept of the witch. In this manner, she has continued with the research and theories of such continental European historians as Carlo Ginzburg and Eva Pocs.

Wilby's first published academic text, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005), was the first major examination of the role that familiar spirits played in Britain during the Early Modern period, and compared similarities between the recorded visions and encounters with such spirits, with shamanism in tribal societies.

The historian Ronald Hutton commented that "Wilby's book is a remarkably interesting, timely and novel way of looking at [magic and witchcraft], and one of the most courageous yet attempted." Another historian specialising in Early Modern witchcraft, Marion Gibson, described the book by saying that "Wilby's conclusions turn out to be a challenge and inspiration to everyone who is interested in the popular magical cultures of the past or the present... Optimistically and humanely, the book makes its strong case for a British shamanic tradition. Whether readers agree with Wilby’s conclusions or not, this is a very important book."

Wilby followed this work with The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010), which provided the first in-depth examination of the witch trial of Isobel Gowdie in 1662. Wilby obtained copies of the trial records, which had been presumed lost for two centuries, from which she concluded that Gowdie had been involved in some form of shamanic visionary trances.

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