Video and audio recordings of Professor Sasha Handley’s recent lecture (1 May 2026) are now available. Sasha’s lecture, entitled ‘The Haunting at the Rectory: Ghost Stories and Women’s Lives in Early Modern England’, closed the Society’s recent day visit to historians at the University of Warwick and from the surrounding region.

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Sasha’s lecture took us to Epworth Rectory in Lincolnshire — home of the Wesley family, and later celebrated as the cradle of evangelical Methodism — to explore family members’ accounts of a supernatural presence in the house during the winter of 1716-17. Central to these accounts were the Wesley daughters whose reports of a ghost reveal the rectory to have been a place of longstanding family divisions and deprivation and trauma, but also serve as acts of resilience and strategic protest.

A former PhD graduate of the University of Warwick, Sasha Handley is now Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester.

Many thanks to Sasha for her excellent lecture, and to all who joined us, at Warwick and online, for this event and the reception with members of the RHS Council which followed.

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Sasha’s lecture is one of many recordings of recent Society events — including lectures, panel discussions and workshops — available to watch again in the Society’s Events Archive.