Event overview
A conference to celebrate the work of writer, critic and cultural historian Marina Warner, in collaboration with the Institute for Languages, Cultures and Societies
Deriving from the Old French 'encantement', enchantment denotes a magical spell. In Marina Warner's account of her parents’ lives, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021), a pair of brogue shoes purchased by her English father for her young Italian mother when she first moved to the UK, becomes ‘proof of membership, a swipe card, a badge which gained her entrance to a certain way of life’. Like Cinderella’s glass slippers the brogues are a charmed gift, transforming its wearer. Indeed, one of the world’s leading specialists in fairy tales, myths and legends, illustrated most comprehensively in From the Beast to the Blonde: (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011), Marina Warner examines the vital role played by magic in imagining alternative possibilities. The enduring power of myths, legends and fairy tales to spellbind us is elaborated in Six Myths of Our Time (the Reith Lectures, 1994), where Marina Warner enlists angels, monsters and beasts to expose the fault lines of masculinity, maternity, childhood, race and other phenomena central to our daily lives.
Enchantment can be summoned to allay fears. In No Go the Bogeyman (1998) the power to terrify us possessed by ogres, giants, monsters and lords of the underworld is placed under Marina Warner’s clear-eyed investigation. Warner asks why ghouls and ghosts and the supernatural world of fairies, spirits, phantasms and zombies exercise such fascination, given that since the Enlightenment, Europe has presented itself as grounded in rational science, rather than in belief. Postcolonial critique runs throughout much of Warner’s works, the uses of the supernatural in the Caribbean appearing, for instance, in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (2002), where the magical powers of transformation, metamorphosis and mutation – recurring concerns in Warner’s work – symbolize the protean, fluid nature of all identity.
Nothing is intrinsically enchanting. We understand the word both as an adjective and as a gerund: a verb, a capacity, a desire to imbue something with a special power. As Marina Warner has examined across her career, most notably in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Monuments and Maidens (1996), the female form has been subjected to enchantment, whether it is sexualized, demonized or sanctified, perhaps more than any other entity in human history.
Throughout, Marina Warner’s interest in art sustains her enquiries, and she has contributed to the exhibition catalogues of many artists including Kiki Smith, Paula Rego and, most recently, Linder.
Marina Warner will be ‘in conversation’ at the conference. The keynote address will be delivered by Philip Terry, author, among many other works, of Dante’s Inferno (2014), Tapestry (2013, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize) and Dante’s Purgatorio (2024), and Marina Warner’s long-time colleague, interlocutor and friend.
Further information, including programme
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Jul 2025 | 9:00am - 7:45pm |
Accessibility
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