Where Can Readers Find Deborah Harkness Interviews About Her Research?

To get under the skin of Deborah Harkness’s research, I looked at how her life as a historian of science bleeds into every sentence of 'A Discovery of Witches' and the rest of the 'All Souls Trilogy'. She didn’t invent a whimsical version of magic out of thin air — she built it from real historical materials. I can picture her in reading rooms, sleeves rolled up, transcribing marginalia from Renaissance manuscripts, poring over the notebooks of figures like John Dee and the collectors whose names appear in the novels. Her academic work, especially 'The Jewel House', shows how she studies how people in Elizabethan and early modern Europe organized and talked about knowledge; that approach gives the supernatural elements a tangible texture. Beyond primary sources, I know she dug into the history of alchemy, herbalism, astrology, and medical recipes. She uses real pamphlets, herbals, and treatises as scaffolding — the kinds of books that sit unglamorously on dusty shelves but are goldmines for sensory detail: lab apparatus, pigments, the smell of cinnabar, the precise language of a 17th-century apothecary. She also leaned on modern science to ground vampires and witches in quasi-plausible biological terms, blending genetics and chemistry with old-world occultism so the magic feels like a hidden branch of knowledge rather than pure fantasy. Librarians, curators, and colleagues in science and history likely helped her navigate archives and decode difficult scripts. Reading her novels, I felt the archive come alive: catalogue references, manuscript quirks, and the lived routines of scholarship. That painstaking, bookish research gives the story authority — you can almost reach out and touch the vellum. For me, the coolest part is how scholarly obsession becomes the beating heart of the magic itself; it’s academic romance and occult history braided together, which I find irresistibly smart and cozy.