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"That Inimitable Art": Magic in Early Modern English Culture Meredith Molly Hand

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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2009 "That Inimitable Art": Magic in Early Modern English Culture Meredith Molly Hand Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “THAT INIMITABLE ART”: MAGIC IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CULTURE By MEREDITH MOLLY HAND A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2009 The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Meredith Molly Hand defended on March 2, 2009. Bruce Boehrer Professor Directing Dissertation John Corrigan Outside Committee Member Gary Taylor Committee Member Daniel Vitkus Committee Member Nancy Warren Committee Member Approved: Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii For Aili and Myrtie, Larry and Raija, Jonathan, and Eric. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’ve accumulated numerous debts, personal and professional, while working on this project. First, I must thank Bruce Boehrer, who was all one could ask for in an advisor. I count myself fortunate to have written this dissertation under his supervision; I’ve certainly benefited from his astonishing breadth of knowledge. Gary Taylor, Daniel Vitkus, and Nancy Warren were excellent committee members, and I am grateful to each of them for their generosity in providing feedback at various stages. I owe special thanks to Gary Taylor for inviting me to work as a research assistant on the Oxford Middleton. I learned so much, and Middleton became an important part of this dissertation. My outside committee member, John Corrigan, assumed that role graciously and was a perceptive reader and a challenging inquisitor during my defenses. This group of scholars was, for me, a dream committee in so many ways. I owe thanks to the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences for awarding me the Kingsbury fellowship for the 2007-2008 academic year; the opportunity to dedicate my time solely to research was invaluable. I have shared versions of several chapters, in fact every chapter except chapter four, at academic conferences and have benefited from questions and feedback from participants at GEMCS, SAA, and RSA. Chapter one appears, with minor changes and under the same title, in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reformé 31.1 (Winter 2008), on pages 69-94. I am grateful to the editors of Renaissance and Reformation and to the anonymous reader of my piece for the helpful feedback, and I thank the journal for allowing me to include the piece here. I am grateful to Michelle Dowd, organizer of the “Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama” seminar for the 2008 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America; to the participants in that seminar, especially Theodora Jankowski and Kay Stanton, for feedback on an early version of chapter two; and to Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda for suggestions for revision and for inviting me to contribute a version of this piece to a proposed volume entitled Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama. The Renaissance Group in the Department of English has read several of these chapters at various stages, and it was one of the joys of the dissertation process to discuss my work with these friends and colleagues. I thank my closest friends, Tatia Jacobson Jordan and Mira Strivelli, for their support; getting together with them for drinks was something to look forward to even when I was at my most frantic. My parents, Raija and Larry Manning, raised me in a household where intellectual curiosity was encouraged. They and my brother, Jonathan Manning, have believed in me unceasingly. My parents- in-law, Sam and Jackie Hand, have been nothing but supportive. Thanks, finally, to my husband, Eric: fount of encouragement, source of happy diversions, bearer of reality checks. Only he knows how much, in how many ways, and for how many kindnesses I thank him. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT vii INTRODUCTION “To practice magic and concealèd arts”: Magical figures, practices, and beliefs 1 CHAPTER ONE “Now is hell landed here upon the earth”: Renaissance poverty and witchcraft in Middleton’s The Black Book 24 CHAPTER TWO “You take no labour”: Women workers of magic in early modern England 52 CHAPTER THREE “So much in divine rapture”: Trapnel, Milton, and the magical public sphere 72 CHAPTER FOUR “The Spirit would vex him monstrously”: Staged possession, skepticism, and belief 112 CHAPTER FIVE “More lies than true tales”: Popular skepticism in Middleton’s mock-almanacs 137 REFERENCES 161 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 180 v ABSTRACT “That Inimitable Art”: Magic in Early Modern English Culture examines representations of magical practitioners and their beliefs and practices as they appear in a variety of canonical and non-canonical early modern cultural productions. Drawing on the practice theory of De Certeau and Bourdieu, as well as on Keith Thomas’s important work on early modern magical practices, I elucidate literary and historical moments in which magical practices appear as practices, consider magical discourse in relation to other early modern discourses, and explore ways in which magical identities were constructed (by others), performed (by the subject and by the community), and even actively sought, appropriated, and shaped (by the subject). In chapter one, I look at intersections between discourses of poverty and witchcraft, by way of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Nashe’s Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil, and Middleton’s The Black Book. I argue that Middleton’s pamphlet highlights the economic foundations of early modern cultural attitudes about witches and rogues and revises the rhetoric of witch and rogue pamphlets, showing the subjects of each in a more sympathetic light. In chapter two, I investigate representations of women workers of magic in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Prophetess, Edmond Bower’s Doctor Lamb Revived, or witchcraft condemn’d in Anne Bodenham, and Jonson’s The Alchemist. I assert that in both Fletcher and Massinger’s play and in Bower’s pamphlet, women practitioners of magic display features typically associated with the male magus, but whereas the magus is associated with privilege and leisure, these women are involved in active labor—they use their magic to earn a living. In chapter three, I suggest that we broaden our understanding of the emergent public sphere in early modern culture to include “possession events,” or moments in which communities gathered to witness the magical practice of possession, whether divine or demonic. It was amid such events that women prophets like Anna Trapnel emerged as public figures. This chapter considers Trapnel’s and John Milton’s experiences and representations of divine possession, their self-fashioning and emergence as public prophets, and their interactions and engagements with magical discourse and vi practices, and reveals ways in which gender was simultaneously limiting and enabling for each as they negotiated their public and prophetic identities. Chapter four turns from divine to demonic possession as I discuss plays such as Jonson’s Volpone and The Devil is an Ass, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton in light of contemporary beliefs about possession. I demonstrate that stage representations of possession are ambiguous and do not necessarily disable belief, even if they satirize it. While chapter four emphasizes the possibility of belief, chapter five focuses on skepticism as it is expressed in Thomas Middleton’s mock-almanacs and mock-prognostications, as well as in his invocation of the genre in dramatic works like No Wit / Help Like a Woman’s. I argue that Middleton’s several contributions to the popular genre reveal the author playing with its conventions and expressing a distinctive skeptical impulse. I thus close this study by looking at this other strand of magical belief—that is, anti-magical belief—and consider its relationship with the beliefs explored in the previous chapters. Together, these chapters turn our attention to important but understudied early modern texts; they emphasize the overlap among religion, magic, and science; and they complicate the Enlightenment narrative that tells the tale of benighted Renaissance culture giving way to eighteenth-century rationality. If the seventeenth century eventually saw a decline in magic, it also saw the coexistence and confluence of magic and skepticism, religious belief and reason, superstition and science. This study acknowledges such convergences and illuminates the persistent and complex role of magic in the production of early modern culture. vii INTRODUCTION “TO PRACTICE MAGIC AND CONCEALÈD ARTS”: MAGICAL FIGURES, PRACTICES, AND BELIEFS This is a project about practitioners of magic and their beliefs and practices. By “practitioners of magic,” I mean a variety of figures, including witches, cunning folk, jugglers, and magicians of the Neoplatonic variety. But practitioners of magic also might include possessed persons and inspired prophets, who share some practices and were sometimes perceived in a similar manner as the former kinds of practitioners of magic. Looking to texts both canonical and non-canonical, “high” literary and “low” popular, including Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Volpone, and The Devil is an Ass, and Fletcher and Massinger’s The Prophetess; prose pamphlets including Middleton’s The Black Book and The Owl’s Almanac, various rogue pamphlets and “cony-catching” pamphlets, witchcraft pamphlets, and longer prophetic tracts like Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone and her Report and Plea; Milton’s poetry and prose; and early modern polemical treatises including Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, I elucidate literary and historical moments in which magical practices or identities were actively sought and performed, and illustrate that magic, for some, was an enabling practice.
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