Possession, Puritanism And Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy

This new monograph tells a compelling story of injustice and passionate resistance to religious persecution in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Through an analysis of a sensational series of demonic possessions and exorcisms, it highlights the existence of controversies in print in the late Elizabethan period of the kind that would one day lead to civil war. This book is the first full-length, analytical study of the pamphlet controversy surrounding John Darrell, a rebellious 'puritan', and his group of exorcists. The cultural implications of the case, based on the puritan (or 'godly') notion that devils could be expelled only by their favoured methods of prayer and fasting, were immense. With their emphasis on the Word, and on God's choice of godly families to demonstrate his power, no matter how unknown or poor these families might be, puritan pamphleteers tapped into existing English Protestant beliefs in providence and equality before God. This is the first book to relate [...]the apparently rather obscure debate over methods of exorcism to parallel rebellions of the godly, the young, women and the 'common' people, some thirty years before these rebellions would begin to surface during the Civil War.