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1 Anti-Quack Literature in Early Stuart 1 ANTI-QUACK LITERATURE IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND A thesis submitted for the degree of Ph. D. in the University of London by ROSS DANDRIDGE 2 Abstract During the thirty years preceding the Civil War, learned physicians such as John Cotta, James Hart, James Primerose and Edward Poeton produced a stream of works attacking those who practised medicine without what they regarded as the proper training and qualifications. Recent scholarship has tended to view these as exercises in economic protectionism within the context of the ‘medical marketplace’. However, increasing attention has latterly been drawn to the Calvinist religious preferences of these authors, and how these are reflected in their arguments, the suggestion being that these can be read as oblique critiques of contemporary church reform. My argument is that professional and religious motivations were in fact ultimately inseparable within these works. Their authors saw order and orthodoxy in all fields - medical, social, political and ecclesiastical - as thoroughly intertwined, and identified all threats to these as elements within a common tide of disorder. This is clearest in their obsession with witchcraft, that epitome of rebellion, and with priest- physicians; practitioners who tended to combine medical heterodoxy, anti-Calvinist sympathies and a taste for the occult, and whose practices were innately offensive to puritan social thought while carrying heavy Catholic overtones. These works therefore reflected an intensely conservative worldview, but my research suggests that they should not necessarily be taken as wholly characteristic of early Stuart puritan attitudes. All of these authors can be associated with the moderate wing of English Calvinism, and Cotta and Hart developed their arguments within the context of the Jacobean diocese of Peterborough, where an entrenched godly elite was confronted by an unusually rigourous conformist church court regime. They sought to promote a particular vision of puritan orthodoxy against conformist heterodoxy; in light of the events of the interregnum, it seems likely that this concealed more diverse attitudes towards medical reform amongst the godly. 3 Contents Chapter Page Acknowledgements 4 Note on Transcriptions 5 Introduction 6 1 Quackery and Physic in early Stuart England 23 2 John Cotta, James Hart and the Diocese of Peterborough 75 3 Anti-Quack Literature in the 1630s 118 4 Witchcraft, Magical Healing and Medical Demonology 162 Conclusion 214 Bibliography 226 4 Acknowledgements Above all I would like to express my sincerest thanks to the two supervisors of this thesis: Dr Jan Broadway, who shepherded the research through its first two years, and Prof. Lisa Jardine who oversaw its completion. Both in fact offered generous advice, support and enthusiasm throughout the project’s life. Thanks are also due to the staff of all the various libraries and archives upon whose holdings this research is based, in particular those of the British Library and the Northamptonshire and West Sussex Record Offices, for their advice and the use of their facilities throughout. Dr Warren Boutcher, Prof. Jerry Brotton, Mr David Harley and the late Prof. Kevin Sharpe all read through early drafts of various chapters and offered much helpful advice and criticism for which I am deeply grateful. Particular thanks are due to Prof. Brotton, who stepped in as supervisor during Prof. Jardine’s thankfully brief period of illness. 5 Note on Transcriptions When quoting from both manuscript and printed works from the early modern period, I have generally endeavoured to retain the original spelling and punctuation. The principle exceptions regard the use of the letters v and u, and i and j, which I have brought into line with conventional modern usage. Abbreviations, with the exception of ampersands, have been silently expanded, and superscript letters have been lowered. When citing manuscript sources, any deletions within the section of text quoted, unless directly relevant to the point at hand, have also been silently omitted, and any interlinear revisions or additions lowered. Text originally rendered in either secretary or italic hands or italic type has been transcribed using roman type, unless the use of italics in the original clearly affects the meaning of the cited passage. 6 Introduction The subject of this thesis is a series of printed and manuscript works attacking the practice of healing by all those who were not learned, professional physicians adhering to orthodox, Galenic principles. It focuses on those works produced during one relatively brief chronological period; the first of the texts dealt with at length here was published in 1612, the last was probably produced no later than 1638. This involves detailed discussion of the works of just five authors: John Cotta, James Hart, Thomas Brian, James Primerose and Edward Poeton. In this introductory survey, therefore, I hope that as well as outlining the historiographical debates relevant to these works, and signalling how I hope to locate them within the context of these, I can also justify my focus on what may appear to be a rather narrow and obscure subject. It seems almost mandatory to begin with the simple point that these works have, so far, been subjected to relatively little sustained analysis. Many historians have drawn upon them as sources, and some have used passages in more wide- ranging studies, or brief introductory essays, to consider the aims and nature of these works. Several of these discussions, as I will outline below, are perceptive and extremely useful.1 But I know of only one full length article devoted to any of the books here discussed, and as far as I know not a single substantial collective study of these works, or indeed of early modern English anti-quack literature in general, has yet been produced.2 Beyond this, however, there are particular features of these works which key into lively ongoing debates relating not only to the history of early modern medicine, but to the history of early Stuart England in general. This brings me to the main reasoning behind the limited chronological sweep of my study. Few would be 1 Particularly useful are: Peter Elmer, ‘Medicine, religion and the puritan revolution’ in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), he medical revolution of the seventeenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 10-45. pp. 13-19; David Harley, ‘James Hart of Northampton and the Calvinist Critique of Priest-Physicians: an unpublished Polemic of the early 1620s’, Medical History, 42 (1998) 362-386. pp. 362-369; Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: he experience of illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) pp. 32-50; Andrew Wear, ‘Religious beliefs and medicine in early modern England’, in Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (eds), he task of healing: Medicine. religion and gender in England and the Netherlands 1450-1800 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1996) pp. 145-169. pp. 158-165. 2 Todd H. J. Pettigrew, ‘“Profitable unto the Vulgar”: The Case and Cases of John Cotta’s Short Discoverie’ in Elizabeth Lane Furdell (ed.), extual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2005) pp. 119-138. 7 perturbed by any study of the political or religious history of England devoted solely to the thirty years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War; indeed, few periods can have been picked over at greater length by historians working in those fields. But several of those who have commented on the anti-quack literature of this period have suggested that it too has to be viewed within the context of the fierce religious disputes developing during this time; in particular, they have noted the puritan sympathies of several of its authors, and identified the distinctive arguments they put forward as reflecting concerns rooted in Calvinist theology, increasingly being marshalled in opposition to that growth of anti-Calvinist churchmanship which was to reach its apogee with the regime of Archbishop Laud.3 The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate these suggestions. By taking together all of the vernacular anti-quack texts produced during this period, identifying the nature of their arguments, and placing these within the various religious and political circumstances within which they were produced, I hope to offer some explanation as to what these authors were really trying to achieve. This will involve consideration of religious motives alongside concerns rooted in more obviously professional medical issues; but equally importantly, I will seek to explore the ways in which concerns rooted in these various different factors in fact interacted with and reinforced one another. The potential implications of this research for medical historians deploying these works as sources will hopefully be obvious, but it is also my hope that the questions raised will be of broader interest to historians of Stuart England. The value of texts on an array of subjects that may appear, to modern eyes, to have little to do with the great political and religious controversies of the early modern period, as documents of the ideological landscape of that period, is increasingly being recognised.4 These works seem to offer a particularly rich example of the ways in which seemingly straightforward professional and scientific texts interrelated with broader ideological disputes. They reflected a conscious desire to contribute to these debates among educated professionals heavily steeped in semiotics and keenly
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