Overview

In medieval England, it became treason not to act-but to imagine. In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester and potential queen, was accused of using astrology and necromancy to predict the death of King Henry VI. What followed was not merely a scandal-it was a legal revolution. In Imagining the King's Death, historian Marcus Calder reconstructs the most consequential witchcraft trial in English history: the moment sorcery crossed from church courts into the machinery of the state. By reclassifying prophecy as ""imagining the king's death,"" the Lancastrian regime transformed belief into evidence and thought into treason. Through court records, parliamentary statutes, and contemporary chronicles, this book reveals how the Crown weaponized magic accusations to eliminate political rivals, dismantle noblewomen's power, and establish a new category of crime-secular witchcraft, prosecuted in the name of national security rather than theology. This is the story of how the English state learned to fear the invisible. Written with the tension of a true-crime investigation and the rigor of legal history, Imagining the King's Death exposes the blueprint that later witch hunts would follow-from Tudor England to the early modern world. Ideal for readers interested in: Medieval witch trials Political repression and treason law Eleanor Cobham and the Lancastrian court The origins of secular surveillance and thought crime History that reads like a courtroom thriller

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