As Diana examines the book, she discovers that it’s an enchanted palimpsest: There is another entire book written underneath the visible writing. She notices that a few pages are missing and it has an odd smell. Diana realizes that it’s a magical item, making her anxious. The book and Diana react strangely to each other when she opens it. In the course of her research into alchemy at Oxford, Diana requests a rare book, Ashmole 782, from Bodleian Library. She sees herself as a non-magical person, but it overflows out of her at times when something unexpected happens, even though she is untrained in its use. As an adult, she’s become a historian who is on the faculty and studies alchemy in the US at Yale and in the UK at Oxford. She was raised in upstate NY by her mother’s sister, Sarah, and Sarah’s partner, Em. She turned away from the magical world almost completely after her parents died tragically when she was a child. Intermarriage is strictly forbidden and even interspecies friendships are severely frowned upon.ĭiana Bishop has always had difficulty wielding her magic. Under normal circumstances, members of each species spend time only with others of their own species. The creatures live secretly among humans, blending into normal human society.

According to Deborah Harkness, several more installments, focusing on other characters and mysteries, are on the way.Ī Discovery of Witches tells the story of Diana Bishop, a witch from a family of powerful witches in a world where there are three types of humanoid magical creatures: witches, vampires and demons. A Discovery of Witches is the first book in the urban fantasy series, which has now expanded beyond the original trilogy to include a fourth book. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale remains the finest study ever written about the generative power of family and community in the early history of the American republic.Both the book and the TV series A Discovery of Witches begin with this short poem, the key to the mystery that the All Souls Trilogy, by Deborah Harkness, spends solving. If not with elite academies, sanctioned by kings, and populated by periwigged gentlemen, then with family and community.

Martha Ballard, a midwife living during the early years of the American Republic in Maine (at the time a province of Massachusetts), had no formal associations but she did have deep and abiding affiliations. Paine, Copley, and Priestley were all beneficiaries of formal institutional associations, mostly through the voluntary scientific and art associations, the American Philosophical Society in America and the Royal Society and Royal Academy in Britain.

A discovery of witches based on book