Lewd Hat Research Articles

The Witch Figure: The Witch of Edmonton

IntroductionIn 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer was hanged for the of Agnes Ratcleife, following a well-publicised court case held at the Old Bailey. Immediately after Sawyer's execution Henry Goodcole, the chaplain of Newgate prison, published a pamphlet recounting in detail the trial and confession of Elizabeth Sawyer. Goodcole refers in the introduction to a number of ballads that describe Sawyer's supernatural orchestration of Agnes Ratcleife's suicide. While Goodcole refutes these claims as groundless rumours, the playwrights William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford include these accusations in their staging of The Witch of Edmonton. Using The Witch of Edmonton as a case study, I will argue that self-murder is a dramatic tool that definitively stigmatises the staged-witch.In studying the relationship between the play and its contextual material, this article is shaped by a number of studies on early modern pamphlets. Sandra Clarke in The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580-1640, for example, has examined moralistic pamphlets at length, while Alexandra Walsham has explored prodigies and providential pamphlets in her book Providence in Early Modern England.1 Tessa Watt has also conducted research into Protestant literature in Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640. In expounding the relationship between providential readings within pamphlet material and the public stage, Peter Lake's The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England has proved especially valuable to this research.2 While suicide pamphlets differ significantly from pamphlets, Peter Lake's work provides a template for the study of early modern suicide material.3 Highlighting important aspects of the relationship between pamphlet and play, Lake argues that: 'The more convoluted accounts of the workings of divine providence reach their apogee in some of the plays where a providential reading of the events portrayed sometimes far transcends the confirmation of the soundbite moral message murder will out so prevalent in the pamphlets. On the contrary, in many of the plays a providential reading of the text becomes, in effect, a legitimating underpinning for the plotting of the play or the telling of the tale.'4 In my study of the Elizabeth Sawyer narratives, this facet of the relationship between source materials and the play proves significant. However, in contrast to Peter Lake's observation, my primary thesis challenges the notion that the dramatisations transcend the moral didacticism of the source pamphlet. Indeed, it is the contention of this article that The Witch of Edmonton wholly inverts Lake's theorisation of the morally soundbiting pamphlet. Instead, I suggest that in the case of Dekker, Ford and Rowley's play The Witch of Edmonton, the nuanced and morally ambiguous narrative of Goodcole's confession pamphlet is reduced to a simplistic morality tale that draws on contemporary fears and superstitions.As originally outlined by St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologicae , the sin of self-murder is threefold. Firstly, suicide is denounced as an act against nature, secondly as a crime against the state, and thirdly as a sin against God.5 From the seventh century onwards, the law against self-murder was rooted in Christianity. But while medieval and early modern ecclesiastical writers cite biblical examples, such as the hanging of Judas, in arguments against suicide, the prohibition of suicide has little scriptural basis; in denunciations of self-murder, the majority of theologians do little more than cite the sixth commandment, 'Thou shault not kill'.6 Nevertheless, in the late Middle Ages, Christian condemnation of suicide was heralded by Augustine in Of the Cities of God:This we say, this we affirme, this wee vniuersally approoue, that no man ought to procure his owne death for feare of temporall miseries; because in doing this hee falleth into eternall: Neither may hee doe it to avoide the sinnes of others, for in this hee maketh himselfe guilty of a deadly guilt, whome others wickednesse could not make guilty: nor for his owne sinnes past, for which hee had more neede to wish for life, that hee might repent himselfe of them: nor for any desire of a better life to bee hoped for after death: Because such as are guiltie of the losse of their owne life, neuer enioye any better life after their death. …

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (review)

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England. By Susannah Brietz Monta. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 245. $75.00.) Martyrdom accounts are intrinsically sensational, which has led to revived interest in them as scholars have become fascinated by relationship of literature and what Anglo-American (residually Puritan) culture calls the body. A century ago, Catholic apologist-historians gathered and discussed narratives of Early Modern English Catholic martyrs to assert dramatically importance of a persistent Catholic culture repressed in Whig historiography and to identify Catholicism as a source of resistance to dominant culture. On other hand, contemporary revived interest in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Actes and Monuments), a work that had enormous and formative cultural impact in early modern England, has helped to put topic of martyrdom back at center of historical and literary attention of early modern specialists. Recent work, such as Brad Gregory's Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999), which takes a comparative approach to Catholic and Protestant martyrologies, and Peter Lake's and Michael Questier's essay on 'Agency and Appropriation at Foot of Gallows: Catholics (and Puritans) Confront (and Constitute) English State (incorporated in The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists & Players in Post-Reformation England [2002]) have analyzed interesting cultural forces at play in situations of martyrdom and martyrological discourse. Like Gregory, Susannah Brietz Monta takes a comparative approach to topic and, like Lake and Questier, she considers issues of representation, political negotiation, and cross-confessional influences and ambiguities in martyrdom accounts and in literary works influenced by them. The strongest argument (convincingly) made in Monta's book is that conventions employed in Protestant and Catholic martyrdom discourse do not greatly differ. Although there were competing martyrologies that were actually read cross-confessionally and had different polemical and theological agendas implicit in them, they shared a basic set of conventions for representing those who were portrayed as dying for and bearing witness to their faith. In three lucid and informative chapters of part 1 of this study, Monta analyzes questions of representation and interpretation involved in production and reception of both Catholic and Protestant martyrdom accounts, their uses to confirm religious truth, and their presentations of marvelous or miraculous spectacles. Although Protestant depictions of providential marvels differ somewhat from Catholic emphasis on miraculous, and Protestants treasured printed texts that contained instructive accounts of martyrs while Catholics celebrated and used physical relics of their martyrs, Monta stresses similarities between two bodies of writing. In four chapters of part 2 of study, Monta cannily sets Protestant and Catholic literary texts against one another both to distinguish their confessional characteristics, but also to explore subtle, sometime ambiguous, ways martyrological literature impacted literary discourse. Thus, chapter four contrasts first book of Spenser's The Faerie Queene with its unusual handling of St. George legend with Anthony Copley's poetic rejoinder, A Fig for Fortune. While, Monta argues, Spenser uses emphasis on suffering to reform St. George legend and to synchronize ... [it] with Protestant apocalyptics (p. …

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (review)

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (review)

At the Boundaries: Early Modern Literature and History - The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England. By Peter Lake, with Michael Questier. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxiv+731, 22 illustrations. $45.00 (cloth).

At the Boundaries: Early Modern Literature and History - The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England. By Peter Lake, with Michael Questier. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxiv+731, 22 illustrations. $45.00 (cloth).

Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700. By Nicholas Tyacke. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+354. $74.95.The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post‐Reformation England. By Peter Lake. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxiv+731. $45.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewAspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700. By Nicholas Tyacke. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+354. $74.95. The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post‐Reformation England. By Peter Lake. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxiv+731. $45.00.Tim Harris Tim HarrisBrown University Search for more articles by this author Brown UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 76, Number 3September 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/425454 Views: 34Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviews: Historical Theory, a Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Malory's Morte D'Arthur: Re-Making Arthurian Tradition, Writing the Reformation: Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619, Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English since the Radical Sixties, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, the

Reviews: Historical Theory, a Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Malory's Morte D'Arthur: Re-Making Arthurian Tradition, Writing the Reformation: Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619, Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English since the Radical Sixties, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, the

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post‐Reformation England

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post‐Reformation England

Reviews of Books:The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England Peter Lake, Michael Questier

Reviews of Books:The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England Peter Lake, Michael Questier

:The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England

:<i>The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England</i>

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England

1Christ Church, Oxford The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post‐Reformation England PeterLakeMichaelQuestier New Haven/LondonYale U.P. 2001xxxiv + 731£30

Peter Lake with Michael Questier. The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. xxxiv, 731. $45.00. ISBN 0-300-08884-1.

Peter Lake with Michael Questier. The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. xxxiv, 731. $45.00. ISBN 0-300-08884-1. - Volume 35 Issue 2

The Antichrist's lewd hat: Protestants, Papists and players in post-Reformation England

The Antichrist's lewd hat: Protestants, Papists and players in post-Reformation England