Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England

Victoria Bladen has taught Shakespeare and literary classics at the University of Queensland, Australia, and has published three Shakespearean text guides in the Insight Publications (Melbourne) series: Romeo and Juliet (2010), Julius Caesar (2011) and Henry IV Part 1 (2012). She co-edited Macbeth on Screen (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2013), in the French Shakespeare on Screen series, and has published articles in several volumes of the series: The Roman Plays, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello (forthcoming). Other publications include articles on: tree and garden imagery in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; representations of Zeus in early modern culture; references to Shakespeare in Jane Austen; and the pastoral genre in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Peter Weir’s film adaptation. Currently she is working on a book project The Tree of Life in the Early Modern Imagination, based on her doctoral research, and co-editing a volume on Shakespeare and the Supernatural. She is on the editorial board for the Shakespeare on Screen in Francophonia project in France (http://www.shakscreen.org/). Marcus Harmes lectures at the University of Southern Queensland. He has published extensively in British and Anglican studies. His monograph Bishops and Power in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2013) surveys the application and the repudiation of bishops’ powers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. A second monograph on adaptation theory in the field of cultural studies was published in 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. He has produced a number of articles and book chapters on early modern and modern religious history.

• Introduction: the intersections of supernatural and secular power, Victoria Bladen and Marcus Harmes. Part I Magic at Court: John Dee, alchemy and authority in Elizabethan England, Glyn Parry; Reginald Scot and the circles of power: witchcraft, anti-catholicism and faction politics, Pierre Kapitaniak; Treasonous Catholic magic and the 1563 witchcraft legislation: the English state’s response to Catholic conjuring in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, Michael Devine. Part II Performance, Text and Language: Shaping supernatural identity in The Witch of Edmonton (1621), Victoria Bladen; ‘Mong’st the furies finde just recompence’: suicide and the supernatural in William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636), Fiona Martin; ‘You shal reade marvellous straunge things’: Ludwig Lavater and the hauntings of the Reformation, Catherine Stevens; The politics of supernatural wonders in Paradise Lost, Martin Dawes. Part III Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body: The Devil and bishops in Post-Reformation England, Marcus Harmes; Sleeping with devils: the sexual witch in 17th-century England, Charlotte-Rose Millar. Index.

"Millar’s fascinating chapter illustrates...how close attention to the supernatural can enrich and expand our understanding of early modern English culture. Taken as a whole, this book contributes significantly to this enterprise."- Darren Oldridge, University of Worcester"Overall, this collection is a valuable addition to the literature on ghosts, exorcism, witchcraft, magic and supernatural literature in the period...offering as they do new perspectives on what we mean by ‘scepticism’ in the early 1600s."- Francis Young, Ely