Ayrshire Federation of Historical Societies Online Conference, Saturday 8 October 2022

11.15am: Welcome Abigayle Brown (AFHS)

11.30-12.00 noon: Elaine W. McFarland: Ayrshire – Most Haunted? One County’s Ghost Story

12.00-12.30pm: John Burnett: Witches and the Devil - What did Robert Burns and his Ayrshire Contemporaries Really
Believe?

12.30-1.00pm: Michelle D. Brock: ‘Hidden works of darkness’: The Witchhunts of Ayrshire

To register, please send your name and email address to Rob Close, craigbraecottages@gmail.com

Our speakers:
Elaine W. McFarland is Professor Emeritus of History at Glasgow Caledonian University. She has previously published on the theme of death and mourning in Scotland and has now moved on to the afterlife. To counteract the gloom, she is also spending her retirement researching the history of Pierrot troupes and seaside entertainment on the Ayrshire coast. She is author/editor of: Protestants First: Orangeism in Nineteenth Century Scotland; Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution; Glasgow’s Greatest Irishman; Scotland and the Great War; A Slashing Man of Action: the Life of General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston.

John Burnett comes from Glasgow but spent much of his professional life in Edinburgh, as a curator in the National Museums of Scotland. His particular interest is in the lives of ordinary Scottish people - their homes, work, leisure, sport etc. One of his books is "Robert Burns and the Hellish Legion" - the Hellish Legion being witches, and he is now
at work on a detailed study of Burns' poem, "Halloween".

Michelle D. Brock is Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. She completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. A scholar of religion and the supernatural in early modern Scotland, she is the author of Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland (Routledge, 2016) and currently finishing a book titled Plagues of the Heart: Piety, Crisis, and Community in Seventeenth Century Scotland. She is also co-editor of Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave, 2018) and the forthcoming Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition.