Instinct, Knowledge and Occult Science on the Early Modern English Stage

Katherine Walker is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary and co-editor of the forthcoming The Handbook to Christopher Marlowe. Her work appears in journals such as English Literary History, Shakespeare and English Literary Renaissance, among others.

• List of FiguresSeries Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Innate Instincts, Embodied Knowledge1. Instinctive Cunning: Divination and Dreams in Wise Women Comedies2. Let Dog be Dog: Animal Instincts, Witchcraft, and Exorcising the Creaturely3. Dekker and Jonson’s Contagious Criminality4. Sidereal Revision in All’s Well That Ends Well5. The Devil’s Apprentice: Clowns and Demonology in Doctor Faustus6. Instinctive Angels and Infinity in Antony and CleopatraCodaBibliographyIndex

This deeply researched book explores how instinct provided vital embodied knowledge in early modernity. Reading a range of sources and centring the perspectives of marginalised figures, Walker recovers the epistemological force of nonrational, somatic experience. This important contribution to the history of knowledge reframes the ‘pricks’ of instinct as a rich method for understanding a complex world.