info@woodslane.com.au
Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

WOODSLANE

Popular Subjects

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781498575515 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

Magic in Early Modern England

Literature, Politics, and Supernatural Power
Description
Author
Biography
Table of
Contents
Google
Preview
This book reconsiders the place of magic at the foundations of modernity. Through careful close reading of plays, spell books, philosophical treatises, and witch trial narratives, Andrew Moore shows us that magic was ubiquitous in early modern England. Rather than a "decline of magic," this study traces a broad cultural fascination with supernatural power. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, poets, philosophers, jurists, and monarchs debated the reality and the morality of magic, and, by extension, the limits of human power. In this way, early modern English writing about magic was closely related to the scientific and political philosophical writing from the period, which was likewise reimagining humanity's relationship to nature. Moore reads Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan alongside contemporary writing by the notorious witch hunters Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. He reminds us that Francis Bacon's scientific works were addressed to King James I, whose own Daemonologie insists on the reality of witchcraft. The fantastical science fiction of Margaret Cavendish, he argues, must be understood within a tradition that includes works like Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the peculiar autobiography of criminal astrologer Simon Forman. By considering these disparate works together Moore reveals the centrality of magic to the early modern project.
Andrew Moore is associate professor at St. Thomas University in Canada. Lee Trepanier is professor at Samford University.
Chapter 1: The Ubiquity of Magic in Early Modern England Chapter 2: Towards a Definition of Early Modern Magic: Four Conceptual Problems Chapter 3: Magic and Materialism: Niccolo Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, and Abraham Cowley Chapter 4: Magical Overreach in Robert Greene and Simon Forman Chapter 5: Illusions of Power in Doctor Faustus and Francis Bacon Chapter 6: Witch Trials and Thomas Hobbes Chapter 7: Margaret Cavendish and the Conquest of the Blazing World Conclusion
Google Preview content