In this event Professor Sasha Handley (University of Manchester) presented her lecture on ‘The Haunting at the Rectory: Ghost Stories and Women’s Lives in Early Modern England’.

The lecture took place on Friday 1 May 2026 and was hosted by the Royal Historical Society. Sasha’s lecture took place as part of the Society’s day visit to the University of Warwick.

 

 

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About this lecture

In the winter of 1716-17, a ghost tormented the residents of Epworth Rectory in Lincolnshire for four long months. The rectory was the home of the Wesley family, a home that would become feted as the cradle of evangelical Methodism by the end of the eighteenth century.

Reports of the rectory haunting, however, tell a very different story of this illustrious family residence. They reveal it as a place of longstanding family divisions, of deprivation and trauma, but also of resilience and strategic protest. This paper uncovers this alternative family history, whilst also reflecting on the role that ghost stories could play in the lives of early modern women more broadly. Finally, the talk examines the long-term legacies of women’s ghostly storytelling.

About our speaker

Sasha Handley is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of monographs Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (2007), Sleep in Early Modern England (2016), and co-editor of New Directions in Social and Cultural History (2018).

Sasha has co-curated two exhibitions: Magic, Witches & Devils in the Early Modern World (2016, John Rylands Research Institute and Library), and Albrecht Dürer’s Material World (2023-24, The Whitworth). She currently leads the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award ‘Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World: An Environmental Approach to the History of Sleep Care’.