Download or read book Witchcraft the Devil and Emotions in Early Modern England written by Charlotte-Rose Millar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch’s links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.
Download or read book Damnable Practises Witches Dangerous Women and Music in Seventeenth Century English Broadside Ballads written by Sarah F. Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.
Download or read book Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe written by Andrew D. McCarthy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with fiction and history-and reading both genres as texts permeated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions-this collection scrutinizes the historical intersection of early modern European superstitions and English stage literature. Contributors analyze the cultural mechanisms that shape, preserve, and transmit beliefs. They investigate where superstitions come from and how they are sustained and communicated within early modern European society. It has been proposed by scholars that once enacted on stage and thus brought into contact with the literary-dramatic perspective, belief systems that had been preserved and reinforced by historical-literary texts underwent a drastic change. By highlighting the connection between historical-literary and literary-dramatic culture, this volume tests and explores the theory that performance of superstitions opened the way to disbelief.
Download or read book Instruments of Darkness written by James Sharpe and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1997-08-29 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive scholarly history of witchcraft in England in over eighty years.
Download or read book Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England written by Marcus Harmes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the people of early modern England, the dividing line between the natural and supernatural worlds was both negotiable and porous - particularly when it came to issues of authority. Without a precise separation between ’science’ and ’magic’ the realm of the supernatural was a contested one, that could be used both to bolster and challenge various forms of authority and the exercise of power in early modern England. In order to better understand these issues, this volume addresses a range of questions regarding the ways in which ideas, beliefs and constructions of the supernatural threatened and conflicted with authority, as well as how the power of the supernatural could be used by authorities (monarchical, religious, legal or familial) to reinforce established social norms. Drawing upon a range of historical, literary and dramatic texts the collection reveals intersecting early modern anxieties in relation to the supernatural, issues of control and the exercise of power at different levels of society, from the upper echelons of power at court to local and domestic spaces, and in a range of publication contexts - manuscript sources, printed prose texts and the early modern stage. Divided into three sections - ’Magic at Court’, ’Performance, Text and Language’ and ’Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body’ - the volume offers a broad cultural approach to the subject that reflects current research by a range of early modern scholars from the disciplines of history and literature. By bringing scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue, the case studies presented here generate fresh insights within and between disciplines and different methodologies and approaches, which are mutually illuminating.
Download or read book Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe written by Jonathan Barry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.
Download or read book Reflections of Renaissance England written by Marie-Helene Davies and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This long-standing series provides the guild of religion scholars a venue for publishing aimed primarily at colleagues. It includes scholarly monographs, revised dissertations, Festschriften, conference papers, and translations of ancient and medieval documents. Works cover the sub-disciplines of biblical studies, history of Christianity, history of religion, theology, and ethics. Festschriften for Karl Barth, Donald W. Dayton, James Luther Mays, Margaret R. Miles, and Walter Wink are among the seventy-five volumes that have been published. Contributors include: C. K. Barrett, Francois Bovon, Paul S. Chung, Marie-Helene Davies, Frederick Herzog, Ben F. Meyer, Pamela Ann Moeller, Rudolf Pesch, D. Z. Phillips, Rudolf Schnackenburgm Eduard Schweizer, John Vissers
Download or read book Popular Magic Cunning folk in English History written by Owen Davies and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cunning-folk were local practitioners of magic, providing small-scale but valued service to the community. They were far more representative of magical practice than the arcane delvings of astrologers and necromancers. Mostly unsensational in their approach, cunning-folk helped people with everyday problems: how to find lost objects; how to escape from bad luck or a suspected spell; and how to attract a lover or keep the love of a husband or wife. While cunning-folk sometimes fell foul of the authorities, both church and state often turned a blind eye to their existence and practices, distinguishing what they did from the rare and sensational cases of malvolent witchcraft. In a world of uncertainty, before insurance and modern science, cunning-folk played an important role that has previously been ignored.
Download or read book Words Like Daggers written by Kirilka Stavreva and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dramatic and documentary representations of aggressive and garrulous women, while often casting such women as reckless and ultimately unsuccessful usurpers of cultural authority, simultaneously highlight, in contending narrative lines, their effective manipulation and even subversion of social and gender hierarchies. Words Like Daggers explores the scolding invectives, malevolent curses, and ecstatic prophesies of early modern women as attested in legal documents, letters, self-narratives, popular pamphlets, ballads, and dramas of the era. By examining the framing and performance of such violent female speech between the 1590s and the 1660s, Kirilka Stavreva dismantles the myth of the silent and obedient women who allegedly populated early modern England. Blending gender theory with detailed historical analysis, Words Like Daggers highlights the capacity of women's language to shape gender and social relationships in the early modern era. Stavreva not only reconstructs the speech acts of individual contentious women but also examines the powerful performative potential of women's violent speech, revealing how the stage, arguably the most influential cultural institution of the Renaissance, orchestrated and aestheticized women's fighting words and, in so doing, showcased and augmented their cultural significance.
Download or read book Malevolent Nurture written by Deborah Willis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Malevolent Nurture, Deborah Willis explores the dynamics of witchcraft accusation through legal documents, pamphlet literature, religious tracts, and the plays of Shakespeare.
Download or read book A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 written by Wallace Notestein and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 written by Wallace Notestein and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wallace Notestein's 'A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718' is a comprehensive exploration of the cultural and legal contexts surrounding the infamous witch hunts during the Early Modern period. Notestein meticulously examines the beliefs, accusations, and persecutions of individuals accused of practicing witchcraft, shedding light on the socio-political climate that fueled such hysteria. Drawing from archival records and contemporary accounts, Notestein's scholarly approach delves deep into the psychological and societal motivations behind the witch trials, offering valuable insights into this dark chapter of English history. Notestein's writing is engaging, with a clear and concise style that appeals to both academics and general readers interested in the topic. His meticulous research and thoughtful analysis elevate this book from a mere historical account to a nuanced exploration of the human psyche and the power dynamics at play in witchcraft accusations. Wallace Notestein, a renowned historian of Early Modern England, brings his expertise to bear in this authoritative study of witchcraft, providing readers with a compelling narrative that challenges conventional assumptions and encourages critical reflection. For anyone interested in the history of witchcraft, Notestein's 'A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718' is an essential read that offers valuable insights into a complex and enduring phenomenon.
Download or read book The Gentleman s Magazine Library written by George Laurence Gomme and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gender and Song in Early Modern England written by Leslie C. Dunn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of English Litterature written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge History of English Literature written by Sir Adolphus William Ward and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge History of English Literature Prose and poetry Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton written by Sir Adolphus William Ward and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
