Lancashire Witches Research Articles

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis

Reviewed by: Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis Chloe Kathleen Preedy MIXED FAITH AND SHARED FEELING: THEATER IN POST-REFORMATION LONDON. By Musa Gurnis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; pp. 272. In Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, Musa Gurnis offers a fascinating reevaluation of how dramatists writing for the commercial English theatre responded to the divisions within and plurality of post-Reformation Christianity. This subject has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but Gurnis’s monograph represents a unique and valuable contribution to the field. Whereas existing studies often draw binary distinctions between “Catholic” and “Protestant” authors or works, Gurnis argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the early modern theatre’s confessional range. Noting the polyvalency of contemporary English Christian identity, at a time when “subcultures of puritans, church papists, Laudians, recusants, ardent conformists, and converts” battled for the “soul” of the authorised Church (2), Gurnis explores the implications for a theatre whose playwrights, players, and paying customers came from across this confessional spectrum. On the one hand, Gurnis suggests, the fact that many early modern plays are the product of collaboration between two or more dramatists, as well as the “public” nature of the commercial playhouses, complicates the extent to which any one play might express a singular religious position. Thus these works were produced by and intended for consumption by “mixed-faith groups” of theatre professionals and playgoers (2). On the other hand, plays that featured characters of various faiths might in turn disrupt the “everyday religious orientations” of individuals by prompting them to engage imaginatively with unfamiliar confessional positions (3). Gurnis’s study evaluates the implications for post-Reformation drama’s depiction of spiritual themes and experiences, offering an informative, thought-provoking, and persuasive new perspective on this important topic. This book’s refreshing alertness to the collaborative practices of the commercial theatre and the diverse socio-religious composition of its audiences is mediated through a strong cultural materialist emphasis on theatre’s “active” relationship to and influence on the wider world (5). Specifically, Gurnis emphasizes the post-Reformation theatre’s capacity to reflect and refract existing confessional affiliations and understandings. The first two chapters contain some of the book’s richest material, as Gurnis uses archival sources to explore contemporary audience composition and the ways in which actual playgoers responded to religious elements in early modern drama. In a compelling refutation of the common assumption that most or all post-Reformation playgoers were conforming Church of England Protestants (7), chapter 1 examines the faiths of those who are known to have attended performances at the commercial playhouses. Through their range and diversity, the case studies in this section persuasively demonstrate the “de facto pluralism of the post-Reformation religious scene” (10), while Gurnis further concludes that, regardless of their own faith, these playgoers might temporarily engage with the confessional positions expressed by dramatic characters in ways that allowed for a fluid interplay between the staged play’s fictional religious culture and that of the post-Reformation [End Page 254] England in which the dramatic work was produced and experienced. Chapter 2 expands thoughtfully on this distinction between actual belief and the imaginative play that, Gurnis suggests, theatre enables. This argument is informed by recent work by Allison Hobgood, Steven Mullaney, and others on the affective dimensions of early modern playgoing, which contemporaries credited with a potentially transformative effect on the emotions of those involved. Gurnis illuminates this model’s prospective religious significance by examining recorded audience reactions to plays such as Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, and by considering the relevance of Anglo-Spanish politics to Thomas Dekker’s Noble Spanish Soldier and the collaborative drama The Spanish Gypsy, usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, and Dekker. Despite the challenges associated with assessing early audience reactions, the wealth of supporting material assembled by Gurnis enables her to compare the responses of individual play-goers to any surviving evidence about their faith, demonstrating that audience members’ reactions to performances “were not always aligned with— or the outcome of—their individual beliefs” (38). Gurnis’s...

The feasting table as the gateway to hell on the early modern stage and page

AbstractWhen banquets are performed on the early modern stage, devils can be seen beside the eaters. This is notably the case when grace has not been said properly before the meal. This article focuses on a group of four texts: Thomas Dekker's If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil Is In It (1611), Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), William Winstanley's The Essex Champion (1690?), and Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus (c.1592). These texts contain particularly striking examples of an early modern anxiety about the importance of saying grace and eating piously rather than greedily for maintaining hierarchies within the state and the household. They also show the ways in which debates about the Eucharist underlie, and can be mapped on to, representations of saying grace. The article demonstrates that the theatre makes visible early modern concerns about souls imperilled and household hierarchies destabilised by improper eating practices.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Banqueting and Women’s Work in The Late Lancashire Witches and Receipt Books for Women

Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches features scenes where the play’s witches engage in feasts that strongly evoke the banquets popular in elite and upwardly mobile households. Contemporaneous with the play’s 1634 performance and publication, there were a plethora of books available for women that gave instructions for preparing banqueting receipts themselves. Where the receipt books represent banqueting as a virtuous activity, The Late Lancashire Witches associates banqueting with witchcraft and improper femininity. This article argues that these differing representations of the banquet allow us to trace women’s involvement in the emerging public sphere.

Introduction

Introduction

Voicing Women, “Community” Drama, and The Late Lancashire Witches

ABSTRACT On August 17, 2012, as part of the Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images 400 Years After the Lancashire Witches conference held at Lancaster University, a semi-staged reading of Heywood and Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches was performed at Lancaster Castle; the first time a witch trial had been enacted at the castle since 1634, when the witches who are dramatized in the play were tried. When a Lancaster judge disagreed with the verdict against the women in 1634 they were sent to London for retrial by the Privy Council, articulating the tension between London and Lancaster, urban and rural societies, and local and centralized justice, with which the play is concerned. This article considers the dimensions of the play that were revealed through directing this practice-based research project. It focuses on female speech-acts and embodiment in the witch drama, the depiction of official and unofficial justice in the play, as well as its representation of community. It also reflects on some of the difficulties that arise from conducting research-through-practice in historic sites, as well as the benefits: for instance, how the spaces in the castle—a working court since the seventeenth century—interacted with the play and furthered an understanding of its preoccupations. It concludes with an analysis of the impact of economic changes on social constructions of neighborliness during the period, suggesting that traditional notions of hospitality and festivity were waning during the early seventeenth century, and that the activities of the witches in the play partly hark back to a time of integrated communality before the intervention of a new fiscal era.

The Late Lancashire Witches:

ABSTRACT In The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome depict witches and their work as intelligible, even mundane parts of a society replete with community rituals and ceremonies. In the county of Lancashire depicted in the play, one may find gallants hunting (1.1, 2.4), gentlemen dining and drinking together (1.1, 2.2, 4.5), an elaborate wedding featuring a feast and dancing (3.1, 3.3), and a skimmington ride to mock the conjugal mishaps of the couple married earlier (4.3). The presence of so many community rituals establishes the play's setting in Lancashire, a region that was notorious for its traditionalism due to its significant recusant community and proclivity for older festive practices, such as Morris dances and maypoles. By showing this community already employing a number of traditional practices, several of which are deployed to manage local problems, the playwrights argue that this community—which includes witches—functions perfectly well. Through the depiction of so many festive gatherings in their witch play, Heywood and Brome interrogate the hegemony and exclusion that so often defines witchcraft plays. Instead, The Late Lancashire Witches reveals how the chaos of witchcraft may be incorporated into social coherence.

Witches before Flying

This paper examines Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), and The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, and considers in detail the witch scenes in both plays and their stage directions during their entrances and exits. The witches in the Jacobean Macbeth of the First Folio, do not explicitly fly in the stage directions. However, they do in the Restoration Macbeth, namely in Davenant’s second Quarto (1674). The question to be raised here is: what evidence is there in the pre-Restoration Macbeth that the witches flew? In order to explore this, we must consider what performance spaces were used for Macbeth in the Jacobean period. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches form an interesting comparison since they were both revised by other writers. The Late Lancashire Witches has not received as much scholarly attention as the other witch plays discussed here. Therefore, as a comparative study, this paper will also discuss the joint authorship of Heywood and Brome in The Late Lancashire Witches and the stage directions of the witch scenes. Although it seems that the witches did not fly in Heywood’s and Brome’s version, there is evidence that the stage directions called for flight in The Lancashire Witches (1681), Thomas Shadwell’s later version. A further illuminating comparison between these plays is that the creatures we are considering here are sinister figures in Macbeth but comic figures in The Lancashire Witches. The audience can see that the three Weird Sisters enter the stage and then vanish into the air, but do not see them fly.

Theatre and/as Witchcraft: A Reading of <em>The Late Lancashire Witches</em> (1634)

Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) is a journalistic play so clearly inspired by judicial records of the contemporary trial that it has been characterized as a commission from the privy council, destined to further the case of the prosecution, but opinions diverge as to the authors’ obedience to or challenge of political authority. This close reading re-examines the ambiguous subversiveness of the play, highlights the pervasive destabilization of patriarchal authority, and shows how by equating witchcraft with theatre the play may expose the fictitious bases of the trial. On the other hand, the reciprocal notion that theatre is witchcraft epitomizes the playwrights’ exploitation and promotion of the public theatre’s resources.

The Lancashire witches: a chronicle of sorcery and death on Pendle Hill

In the febrile religious and political climate of late sixteenth-century England, when the grip of the Reformation was as yet fragile and insecure, and underground papism still perceived to be rife, Lancashire was felt by the Protestant authorities to be a sinister corner of superstition, lawlessness and popery. And it was around Pendle Hill, a sombre ridge that looms over the intersecting pastures, meadows and moorland of the Ribble Valley, that their suspicions took infamous shape. The arraignment of the Lancashire witches in the assizes of Lancaster during 1612 is England's most notorious witch-trial. The women who lived in the vicinity of Pendle, who were accused alongside the so-called Samlesbury Witches, then convicted and hanged, were more than just wicked sorcerers whose malign incantations caused others harm. They were reputed to be part of a dense network of devilry and mischief that revealed itself as much in hidden celebration of the Mass as in malevolent magic. They had to be eliminated to set an example to others. In this remarkable and authoritative treatment, published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the case of the Lancashire witches, Philip C Almond evokes all the fear, drama and paranoia of those volatile times: the bleak story of the storm over Pendle

Hornpipes and Disordered Dancing in <em>The Late Lancashire Witches</em>: A Reel Crux?

This note considers a potential crux on the word 'reel' in Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), as referring to the country dance of the same name as well as a whirling or rolling motion. Contemporary references to witches' dancing alongside the dancing of reels and hornpipes are discussed, and previous editorial treatment of the play is considered alongside that of Shakespeare.

In Search of the English Sabbat: Popular Conceptions of Witches’ Meetings in Early Modern England

This article explores the evidence for belief in the witches’ sabbat in early modern England. England is generally thought of as a country where the concept of the sabbat did not exist, and it was certainly largely absent from elite thinking on witchcraft, as displayed in the witchcraft statutes of 1563 and 1604 and Elizabethan and Jacobean demonological writings. But evidence entering the historical record mainly via deposi- tions taken by justices of the peace suggests that there was a widespread popular belief in the sabbat or in parallel forms of witches’ meetings, evidence that the concept of the sabbat existed in popular culture. In this, the English evidence seems to support Carlo Ginzburg’s model of the sabbat being essentially a popular construction in its origins. The article also examines a play based on one of the historical incidents analysed, Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), and uses it as a starting point for a brief discussion of witchcraft motifs in contemporary drama, notably Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

Dramatic Text, Music Text:

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.

Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon

Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon Katherine Mannheimer Doctor: What was that struck me? Scaramouch: Struck you, sir? Imagination. Doctor: Can my imagination feel, sirrah? Scaramouch: Oh, the most tenderly of any part about one, sir! The Emperor of the Moon, II.iii.103-6 This essay reads Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687) as a playful examination of two modes of representation: namely, theatrical and print-based fictions. In many ways the two modes seem to constitute two opposite epistemological approaches: theatricality is invested in public, performative, and communally-arrived-at methods of apprehending our world; while prose narrative prioritizes private, absorptive, and intensely individual forms of perception. Behn explores these contrasts but ultimately implies that the most internal, subjective forms of mental imaging—the kinds of enraptured fantasizing usually associated with acts of reading—can give rise to the most external, demonstrative forms of spectacle. Moreover, by thus obscuring the boundaries between the public and empirical on the one hand and the private and empathic on the other, The Emperor of the Moon begins to "re-gender" these modes of experience. I end the essay by exploring the literary-historical significance of the fact that Behn was detaching drama and print from the epistemological paradigms usually ascribed to each (and reconsidering the position of women within these) at just the moment when this female author—in tandem with larger literary-historical developments—was making a crucial move from stage to page. [End Page 39] I. Colliding Epistemologies: Theatrical Spectacle and Textual Interiority The Emperor of the Moon stands at the crossroads of two opposite trends in the history of representation. On the one hand, the play belonged to a series of productions known as the "Dorset Garden spectaculars," staged under the direction of Thomas Betterton between 1673 and 1692. Described by Judith Milhous as "extend[ing] the technical capacities of the Restoration theatre to their utmost," these works included the opera-versions of Macbeth and The Tempest, Thomas Shadwell's Psyche, Charles Davenant's Circe, and John Dryden's King Arthur. The trend could be said to have reached its height in the 1680s, with what Milhous calls the "machine-farce boom." This flowering of pageantry—in which Milhous sees Behn's Emperor as a key participant—was characterized by such productions as Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches and William Mountfort's Doctor Faustus. In its embrace of the supernatural, the trend pushed theatrical spectacle to phantasmagorical, cataclysmic extremes (Milhous 43). This increased emphasis on spectacle, however, seems to defy longer-term narratives of literary history. For during this same period, most scholars agree, theatre as a medium was gradually losing ground to prose fiction. J. Paul Hunter describes this transition as a "shift of artistic energy from dramatic to narrative modes": culturally, "communality" had become "thoroughly debased," and authors felt that "the route to influence" was instead "a private and subjective one, to be found only in private converse between a fixed book and the response of an individual reader, deciding silently and alone"("Stage and Closet" 286). Laura Brown, Rose Zimbardo, Ian Donaldson, John Loftis, and Julie Stone Peters chart similar transitions; thus Brown notes that once a new interest emerged in portraying "protagonists' gradually unfolding consciousnesses," prose fiction had an advantage: for such narrative "has easier access to the private life and to the interiority of its characters than does a verbal construct destined for the more public world of the stage"("Drama and Novel" 301). 1 When it came to seem that the movements of the individual mind might contain more "truth" than outward passions or political displays, the newer medium came to seem more relevant, more revealing. Less consensus has formed around the question of when exactly this reprioritizing occurred. Because Hunter is most interested in the moment at which prose fiction finally claimed dominance in the form of the novel, he calls it a "phenomenon of the 1740s"("Stage and Closet" 286). Other scholars have focused on the moment when the drama itself became "affective" or "interiorized" and have thus seen the watershed period as the 1690s, when playwrights like...

Hedgerows and Petticoats: Sartorial Subversion and Anti-enclosure Protest in Seventeenth-century England

The struggle to determine ownership of property, gender identity, and social status engaged through cross-dressing --- particularly as a skimmington -- challenged and shaped seventeenth century notions of property and ownership. The debated possession of one’s land, class, and gender played out in anti-enclosure protests and in theatre, including the plays The Late Lancashire Witches , The Tamer Tamed and The Roaring Gir l. Drawing on the traditional use of a skimmington to redress communal injustice, several men dressed in women’s clothing adopted the title Lady Skimmington to protest enclosures of communally accessed forests during the Western Rising, 1626-1632. Similarly, women cross-dressed and adopted male titles, such as captain, to protest enclosure. Since women did not have an acceptable sphere for cross-dressing, such as in a skimmington, cross-dressing women were more deeply threatening to the state than men cross-dressing as Lady Skimmington. Theatrical, cross-dressing, female characters provide insight in the motivations for female cross-dressing. Cross-dressing characters in the field or on the stage provided a battleground for communities and the state to contest ownership of land, class mobility, and gendered identity.

Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (review)

112Comparative Drama for the study ofproduction and reception ofwork by these playwrights and the type oftheater companies that stage them. Where are the theater scholars who can take up this call to do the deep work of recording this theater practice and reception instead of letting the texts be the privileged record? Griffin is not positioned to do this work, but her fine study paves the way for it. Sara Freeman Illinois Wesleyan University Matthew Steggle. Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. 222. $74.95. Matthew Steggle's RichardBrome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage is a welcome addition to the Revels Plays Companion Library. Indeed, this volume solidly lives up to the claim on the back cover as "the authoritative reference work on this appealing and underrated playwright." Steggle organizes the book as a chronological journey through Bromes career, situating his fifteen noncollaborative plays and sole surviving collaborations , The Late Lancashire Witches or The Witches ofLancashire and A lovial Crew, within historical contexts as they relate to the play's date of composition and/or performance. Through impressively controlled readings ofthe plays and other primary source materials, Steggle outlines a thorough—and thoroughly convincing—chronology that corrects some previous attributions and minimizes or eliminates some previously made guesses. In addition Steggle provides a critical companion that meticulously addresses scholarly discussions of Brome and advances that discussion by several giant leaps. In his introduction Steggle clearly foregrounds his argument as he surveys past scholarship on Brome. Steggle challenges outmoded assumptions that Brome's supposed artistic limitations are a reflection of low-class standing; he observes that Brome's obvious success and prominence during his lifetime and afterward belie such narrow thinking. While Brome was indeed Ben Jonson's manservant, Steggle suggests that there is a clear evolution in their relationship, from manservant, to rival, to friend. Clearly Brome was also Jonson's student in many ways, just as he was Shakespeare's; Steggle draws this observation out at several points in the subsequent chapters. At the heart of the introduction is Steggle's principal contention—pursued and buttressed through his subsequent analyses—that Brome is a more interesting, complex, and important playwright Reviews113 than he has previously been acknowledged to be. The sum ofthe evidence that Steggle offers decidedly convinces. Although the body of scholarship devoted to Brome is not vast, Steggle's reading and knowledge is and, as a result, this bookvery effectively explores the political, social, and topical implications of Brome's work. Moreover, Steggle situates, or "places," Brome in far more detailed contexts than has previously been attempted. Indeed, as his book's subtitle (PlaceandPolitics on the Caroline Stage) implies, place or location—in material,cultural,political, economic, geographical , and literary-historical terms—is a central theme in Steggle's study of Brome's life and works. Clearly Martin Butler's Theater and Crisis, 1632-1642 is a crucialworkfor Steggle's arguments here; important as that study is,Steggle's use ofit in delving into more specifics concerning Brome's career from artistic, political, and legal standpoints is compelling. Similarly, Steggle makes effective use of Ralph J. Kauffman's 1961 Richard Brome: Caroline Dramatist, subtly yet steadily revealing the obvious datedness of that work. Politely acknowledging as he does that certain archival materials and scholarly achievements postdated Kauffman's work in no waylessens the extent to which Steggle confidently overgoes Kauffman's critical biography. For nearly all of the plays the central thematic link for Steggle is Brome's manipulation of"place-realism."While this and other elements do indeed show Brome to be a writer who bridges the gap between the earlier plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher and others, and the later Restoration Comedy, Steggle is right to assert that there is more to be said. While all of his readings reveal a profound knowledge of the various cultural, physical, geographical, economic, political, and literary intertexts that inform Brome's work writ large, Steggle's reading of The Northern Lass is especially instructive. Perhaps Brome's earliest play, The Northern Lass, as Steggle compellingly reads it, employs place-realism in order to present a protofeminist text...

The life and works of the Lancashire novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805-1882

Part 1 Introduction: contemporary reception - the pre and early Victorian critical heritage the Victorian reaction late Victorian views modern judgements an age in transition. Part 2 Blood and thunder - Gothic apprenticeship: essential juvenilia, 1821-1823 the best of the rest - December Tales, 1823 the first -Sir John Chiverton, 1826. Part 3 Fame and infamy - Rookwood, romance, 1834: life in London - business, family and Fraser's, 1826-1834 the design of romance - Rookwood, Scott and the gothic the phantom steed - the outlaw narrative of Rookwood. Part 4 Writing the underworld - Jack Sheppard, romance, 1839: a sort of Hogartharian novel vagabondiana - Jack Sheppard and social exploration the storm - the Newgate controversy. Part 5 historical novelist - prophecy, passivity and tragedy: twin-born romances - Guy Fawkes and The Tower of London, 1840 hell on earth - Old St. Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire, 1841 the devil and his works - Windsor Castle, 1843 and Auriol, 1844. Part 6 Lancashire novelist: dream of flying - The Lancashire Witches - Romance of Pendle Forest, 1848 the Lancashire novels. Part 7 greatest axe-and-neck romancer of our time: growing old gracefully - 1850-1881 man of La Manchester. Part 8 Something like conclusion: appendices.

The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories

1Cardiff University The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories Robert Poole Manchester Manchester U.P. 2002 xiv + 226 Paperback£14.99

Reviews: Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print, the History and Narrative Reader, Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England,

Reviews: Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print, the History and Narrative Reader, Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England,

The Lancashire witches: histories and stories

This book is the first major study of England's biggest and best-known witch trial; which took place in 1612, when ten witches were arraigned and hung in the village of Pendle in Lancashire. In this volume, 11 experts from a variety of fields offer new surveys of these events and their meanings for contemporaries, for later generations, and for the present day. Essays look at the politics and ideology of witch-hunting, the conduct of the trial, the social and economic contexts, the religious background, and the local and family details of the episode. This is the most comprehensive study of any English witch trial.