Download or read book Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama 1538 1681 written by Eric Pudney and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Warburg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for an outstanding work of literary history This is a study of the representation of witches in early modern English drama, organised around the themes of scepticism and belief. It covers the entire early modern period, including the Restoration, and pays particular attention to three plays in which witchcraft is central: The Witch of Edmonton (1621), The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and The Lancashire Witches (1681). Always a controversial issue, witchcraft has traditionally been seen in terms of a debate between ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. This book argues instead that, while the concepts of scepticism and belief are central to an understanding of early modern witchcraft, they are more fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the witchcraft debate, but as rhetorical tools used by both sides.
Download or read book Scepticism and Belief in English Witchcraft Drama 1538 1681 written by Eric Pudney and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book situates witchcraft drama within its cultural and intellectual context, highlighting the centrality of scepticism and belief in witchcraft to the genre. It is argued that these categories are most fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the debate around witchcraft, but as rhetorical tools used within it. In drama, too, scepticism and belief are vital issues. The psychology of the witch character is characterised by a combination of impious scepticism towards God and credulous belief in the tricks of the witch's master, the devil. Plays which present plausible depictions of witches typically use scepticism as a support: the witch's power is subject to important limitations which make it easier to believe. Plays that take witchcraft less seriously present witches with unrestrained power, an excess of belief which ultimately induces scepticism. But scepticism towards witchcraft can become a veneer of rationality concealing other beliefs that pass without sceptical examination. The theatrical representation of witchcraft powerfully demonstrates its uncertain status as a historical and intellectual phenomenon; belief and scepticism in witchcraft drama are always found together, in creative tension with one another.
Download or read book Scepticism and Belief in English Withcraft Drama 1538 1681 written by Eric Pudney and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Witches of Lancashire written by Richard Brome and published by Theatre Arts Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ribald comedy, first performed at The Globe in 1634, everything is going wrong at a wedding, and everyone in attendance is eager to believe a local coven is to blame.
Download or read book Montaigne and Bayle written by Craig B. Brush and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is traditional in the literature on Pierre Bayle to make some refer ene e to iVlontaigne as one of the masters of skepticism in whose tracks he follows, albeit hardly so eloselyas Charron had. Time and again critics feel the need to mention Montaigne and Bayle in the same context, sometimes to contrast their brands of Pyrrhonism, more often to explain similarities in their ideas and methods, which have frequent ly been regarded as important steps in the gradual evolution of un Christian, even anti-Christian, thought. Their names were already associated during Bayle's life, for example, in the mediocre work by Dom Alexis Gaudin, La Distinction et la Nature du Bien et du MaI, Traite ou l'on combat l'erreur des Manicheens, les sentimens de Jvfontaigne & de Charron, & ceux de J. Vfonsieur Bayle. In the nineteen th century, the author of the Dictionnaire historique et critique wa~ generally elassified as a skeptic; and his name was inevi tably linked with the essayist's. In his Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve pictured Bayle as one of the avowed skeptics in Montaigne's funeral cortege and spoke of both men as "d'autant pIus fourbes qu'ils ne le sont pas toujours." His later works show that he revised his opinion on each somewhat, l but in this he was unusual for his century.
Download or read book Broken Idols of the English Reformation written by Margaret Aston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 1994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.
Download or read book A History of Caricature Grotesque in Literature and Art written by Thomas Wright and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Grimoires written by Owen Davies and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a grimoire? The word has a familiar ring to many people, particularly as a consequence of such popular television dramas as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. But few people are sure exactly what it means. Put simply, grimoires are books of spells that were first recorded in the Ancient Middle East and which have developed and spread across much of the Western Hemisphere and beyond over the ensuing millennia. At their most benign, they contain charms and remedies for natural and supernatural ailments and advice on contacting spirits to help find treasures and protect from evil. But at their most sinister they provide instructions on how to manipulate people for corrupt purposes and, worst of all, to call up and make a pact with the Devil. Both types have proven remarkably resilient and adaptable and retain much of their relevance and fascination to this day. But the grimoire represents much more than just magic. To understand the history of grimoires is to understand the spread of Christianity, the development of early science, the cultural influence of the print revolution, the growth of literacy, the impact of colonialism, and the expansion of western cultures across the oceans. As this book richly demonstrates, the history of grimoires illuminates many of the most important developments in European history over the last two thousand years.
Download or read book Divination on stage written by Folke Gernert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magicians, necromancers and astrologers are assiduous characters in the European golden age theatre. This book deals with dramatic characters who act as physiognomists or palm readers in the fictional world and analyses the fictionalisation of physiognomic lore as a practice of divination in early modern Romance theatre from Pietro Aretino and Giordano Bruno to Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Thomas Corneille.
Download or read book Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe 1400 1800 written by L. Whaley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women have engaged in healing from the beginning of history, often within the context of the home. This book studies the role, contributions and challenges faced by women healers in France, Spain, Italy and England, including medical practice among women in the Jewish and Muslim communities, from the later Middle Ages to approximately 1800.
Download or read book Man as Witch written by R. Schulte and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witch-hunts in Central Europe were by no means focused only on women; one in four alleged witches was male. This study analyzes and describes the witch trials of men in French and German-speaking regions, opening up a little known chapter of early modern times, and revealing the conflicts from which witch-hunts of men evolved.
Download or read book The Witch written by Ronald Hutton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets the notorious European witch trials in the widest and deepest possible perspective and traces the major historiographical developments of witchcraft
Download or read book The Devil Within written by Brian Levack and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating, wide-ranging survey of the history of demon possession and exorcism through the ages. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of the Reformation, thousands of Europeans were thought to be possessed by demons. In response to their horrifying symptoms—violent convulsions, displays of preternatural strength, vomiting of foreign objects, displaying contempt for sacred objects, and others—exorcists were summoned to expel the evil spirits from victims’ bodies. This compelling book focuses on possession and exorcism in the Reformation period, but also reaches back to the fifteenth century and forward to our own times. Entire convents of nuns in French, Italian, and Spanish towns, thirty boys in an Amsterdam orphanage, a small group of young girls in Salem, Massachusetts—these are among the instances of demon possession in the United States and throughout Europe that Brian Levack closely examines, taking into account the diverse interpretations of generations of theologians, biblical scholars, pastors, physicians, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and historians. Challenging the commonly held belief that possession signals physical or mental illness, the author argues that demoniacs and exorcists—consciously or not—are following their various religious cultures, and their performances can only be understood in those contexts. “Riveting [and] readable . . . must-reading for students of history, psychology and religion.” —Publishers Weekly “Levak, a distinguished historian of early modern witchcraft, now sets exorcism in a long historical perspective, providing the most comprehensive and scholarly overview of the theme yet published.” —Peter Marshall, Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book Memorials of Old Dorset written by Thomas Perkins and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dangerous Familiars written by Frances E. Dolan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar; and not in the master, husband, or father, but in the servant, wife, or mother. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.Frances E. Dolan examines stories ranging from the profoundly disturbing to the comically macabre: of husband murder, wife murder, infanticide, and witchcraft. She surveys trial transcripts, confessions, and scaffold speeches, as well as pamphlets, ballads, popular plays based on notorious crimes, and such well-known works as The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. Citing contemporary analogies between the politics of household and commonwealth, she shows how both legal and literary narratives attempt to restore the order threatened by insubordinate dependents.
Download or read book A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern Volume 1 written by John MacKinnon Robertson and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama written by Mark Kaethler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.
