‘History has some truth, but we are not told the real truth’

Maya Stiasny was troubled by a stubbornly persistent flaw in her A-level students’ conception of historical interpretations. Students were seeing historians’ arguments as snapshots in time, emerging magically and unproblematically out of personal views, rather than crafted as a process. Stiasny wanted her students to understand that process as an academically rigorous method. In the context of the historiography of witchcraft, Stiasny found a way to show that historical interpretations do not exist in a vacuum; they are crafted through a long journey of evidential reasoning and they are intricately connected to other historians’ scholarship...