Marcus Harmes and Victoria Bladen, editors.<i>Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England</i>.

This collection brings together nine papers that address the operation of supernatural and secular power in early modern England. This is, of course, a massive and diffuse subject. Even if we do not adopt a fully Foucauldian position, power in any developed society is a multifaceted phenomenon that works in a variety of different ways at multiple levels. Accordingly, any collection of essays, like the one under review here, can only provide a very incomplete map of the contours of “power.” The problem of grouping such essays in a way that will ensure a degree of intellectual coherence is also challenging. Further complications arise from how the meanings of the terms “secular” and “supernatural” differed in the early modern period from their current usage, and how early modern observers possessed very different notions of the distinction between the two. The essays gathered together in this volume are grouped into three sections. The first of these sections, on magic at court, begins with Glyn Parry’s “John Dee, Alchemy and Authority in Elizabethan England.” This serves to remind the reader of the political importance of alchemy in the late sixteenth century and also introduces the backlash against it that was engineered by two successive archbishops of Canterbury, John Whitgift and Richard Bancroft. These two senior clerics viewed alchemy, lumped together with prophecy and astrology (and, indeed, as a later essay in this collection reminds us, demonic possession) as symbolic of religious fanaticism. Pierre Kapitaniak’s essay on Reginald Scot is a useful addition to the growing literature on that skeptical author. The author’s interpretation of Scot’s position in Elizabethan patronage networks and his evaluation of the sources Scot used in The Discoverie of Witchcraft are especially interesting. Michael Devine’s essay on the contribution of what he terms “treasonous Catholic magic” in Essex to the creation of the 1563 English witchcraft act likewise adds to our knowledge of its subject, while reminding us that witchcraft was sometimes a phenomenon with important political overtones. In the second section, on “Performance, Text and Language,” the volume moves across disciplinary boundaries from historical to literary studies. Victoria Bladen provides additional insights into that now much-studied work, The Witch of Edmonton, while Fiona Martin looks at the relationship between the supernatural and suicide in a lesser-known work, William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker. Martin Dawes moves the reader back to more familiar territory, albeit investigated from a fresh perspective, in an essay entitled “The Politics of Supernatural Wonders in Paradise Lost,” which is especially valuable in attempting to link Dawes’s interpretation of John Milton’s position on the interaction between secular and supernatural power to the religio-political world of post-Restoration England. The fourth essay in this section, by Catherine Stevens, is a fascinating and original discussion of Ludwig Lavater’s Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght, the English title of the 1572 translation of a work first published in German in 1569. In this essay, Stevens leads the reader through the massive theological, logical, and evidential problems that Lavater had to confront in his Protestant interpretation of ghosts, which eventually led him into ever-deepening confusion. The collection is rounded off by two essays in a section entitled “Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body.” In the first of these, Marcus Harmes, again examining a reasonably familiar topic, addresses the reactions of a number of high-ranking ecclesiastics, notably Richard Bancroft, to the problem of demonic possession in the decades around 1600, and provides further thought on how this issue fit with the ecclesiastical politics of the time. In the second, Charlotte-Rose Millar rigorously examines seventeenth-century pamphlet literature to explore the theme of “Sleeping with Devils: The Sexual Witch in Seventeenth-Century England.” She argues that sex between the devil and the witch was more common in English witchcraft beliefs than has previously been thought.

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