Many Tudor and Stuart people – from the most educated elites to ordinary working men and women – believed that alongside their own, visible world was what has been termed an ‘invisible world’. These two worlds were deeply intertwined: from the malevolent powers of witches, to the demonstration of divine will in monsters and other ‘wonders of nature’, they thought that the supernatural shaped the natural world.
Across the five sessions the course will examine many different facets of such supernatural beliefs. We’ll begin with surveying some of these, thinking about the medieval inheritance and the ways in which broader social, religious and cultural changes in Tudor and Stuart England challenged these older beliefs.
The next session will take a closer look at one of the most notorious and well-studied areas of early modern belief in the supernatural: witchcraft. What did early modern men and women believe witches could do, and why? Did early modern Britain see ‘witch crazes’? What do ideas about witchcraft tell us about early modern society and culture?
From there we’ll move on to look at demonic possession. The idea that people might be possessed and controlled by agents of the devil has long been controversial, and both contemporaries and historians have put forward many different explanations, from illness to fraud.
In the fourth session we’ll move on from the study of these evil spirits, to consider other pervasive supernatural beings: angels, ghosts and fairies. We’ll see how changing religious beliefs, and differences between elite and popular attitudes, made such phenomena increasingly controversial in early modern Britain.
In the final session we’ll move forward in time, considering whether the later 17th and 18th centuries saw a ‘decline in magic’. When and why did these beliefs disappear? Did science defeat magic?
By focusing on magic and the supernatural this course will allow students to explore some of the biggest themes of 16th and 17th century Britain: power, politics, gender, and social conflict. Throughout the course it will be argued that ideas of the supernatural, some of which may seem ‘bizarre’, ‘superstitious’, or ‘irrational’ in modern eyes, offer us unique insight into the early modern mindset, and into a world where they made perfect sense.
The course will be taught through a mixture of lecture and class discussion, with a particular emphasis on contemporary sources (both written and visual but always in translation where necessary).
