Demonic possession and exorcism in early modern England contemporary texts and their cultural contexts

Abstract

This is the first book exclusively devoted to demonic possession and exorcism in early modern England. It offers, for the first time, modernised versions of the most significant early modern texts on nine cases of demonic possession from the period 1570 to 1650, the key period in English history for demonic possession. The nine stories were all written by eye-witnesses or were derived from eye-witness reports. They involve matters of life and death, sin and sanctity, guilt and innocence, of crimes which could not be committed and punishments which could not be deserved. The nine critical introductions which accompany the stories address the different strategic intentions of those who wrote them. The modernised texts and critical introductions are placed within the context of a wide-ranging general introduction to demonic possession in England across the period 1550 to 1700.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.