Many thanks to guest blogger Atreya Madrone for contributing the below post! Atreya is a graduate student at the UBC School of Information and is completing a professional experience with RBSC this summer working with vertical files, which are individual or small groups of archival materials.
This is part of an ongoing series of blog posts that gives students and RBSC team members a chance to show off some of the intriguing materials they encounter serendipitously through their work at RBSC.
This summer I am undergoing a Professional Experience working with the vertical files at Rare Books and Special Collections. There is a wide range of things to be found in the vertical files, including a copy of Helen Lawder’s witchcraft trial from 1662, which was transcribed in the early 1800s. Lawder was convicted of that “horrid, abominable, and damnable crime” and was to be “strangled at the stake till she was dead and then her body to be burned to ashes.” Myself and other student workers had never seen an actual trial proceeding for witchcraft, so it was a fascinating read – there are many wild details, so come by and read it yourself!