History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture

Bill Angus is a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, New Zealand. He has written extensively on early modern drama and material culture. His books with Edinburgh University Press include Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson (2016), Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre (2018), Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019), co-edited with Lisa Hopkins, and his last monograph, A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture (2022). His latest edited collection Poison on the Early Modern English Stage, co-edited with Kibrina Davey and Lisa Hopkins, was published in 2023.

• Introduction. The Ways: Transformation, Binding and Presence 1. Axes: Ecstatic Heights and Nightmare Depths 2. Magic: Transformation and Self-determination 3. Music: Going Down to the Crossroads 4. Gods: Appointments with the Divine 5. Terminus: The Night, the Crossroads and the Stake 6. Literature: Liminal Ground in Early Modern Drama 7. Hallowed Roads: Routes to the Crossroads 8. Wanderers: The Predicament of a Stranger 9. Monsters: ‘Spirits of another sort’ 10. Protection: The X in the Landscape Conclusion. The Parting: Intersections

Bill Angus offers a rich and fascinating exploration of the symbolic potential of the uncanny points at which roads simultaneously meet and diverge, showing that whether as places for selling one’s soul, burying the outcast dead, or encountering the supernatural, crossroads in the early modern imagination were charged and dangerous.