Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 A Literary Geography of Exorcism: ‘Farre from the Eye of Justice’
- 2 ‘A Booke Declaring the Fearfull Vexation’: Spreading the Word
- 3 ‘Sinnful, Shamfull, Lying and Ridiculous’: The Possession of William Sommers
- 4 ‘Pare thy Nails, Dad’: Authority and Subversion in Possession Narratives
- 5 Dialogicall Discourses and Summarie Answeres
- 6 The Madman in the Wilderness
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - ‘Pare thy Nails, Dad’: Authority and Subversion in Possession Narratives
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 A Literary Geography of Exorcism: ‘Farre from the Eye of Justice’
- 2 ‘A Booke Declaring the Fearfull Vexation’: Spreading the Word
- 3 ‘Sinnful, Shamfull, Lying and Ridiculous’: The Possession of William Sommers
- 4 ‘Pare thy Nails, Dad’: Authority and Subversion in Possession Narratives
- 5 Dialogicall Discourses and Summarie Answeres
- 6 The Madman in the Wilderness
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
For your children. Make it your chiefest work to make them, 1. Godly. 2. Useful …
Robert Harris to his family, quoted in Samuel Clarke, A General Martyrologie (1677).Had I a sonne to serve mee so, I would conjure a divell out of him
Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634).As the complex histories of the first texts on John Darrell's work in Burton and Nottingham suggest, what was going on at a literary level at the dispossessions of Darrell and his friends was just as important as their political or otherwise factual context. How and why the events were written about and how and why they were responded to in print are as important as the historical facts of the case, because the battle was one of representation and perception, fought through mutual stereotyping. It is difficult enough to establish the circumstances of the texts’ production – the basic story of what happened when – because each fragmentary account has its own cultural limitations and biases. But what can be said about how those accounts construct something beyond the factual – not just establishing that Darrell used Rogers's prayers, or Harsnett investigated Darrell's financial affairs, but taking part in a literary and cultural battle where imagery, genre and topos mattered as much as the disputed facts?
Chapter 2 established that the habitual discourses of social status and education, as well as constructions of godly culture as likely to be particularly sociable, were important ways in which contemporaries thought and wrote about the affair.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Possession, Puritanism and PrintDarrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy, pp. 101 - 125Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014