J. Starr Dissertation

Student ID Number (req’d) 1443356 COVERSHEET FOR DISSERTATION Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU MA/MRES IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK The Wonderful Discoveries: English Witchcraft and Early Stuart Title of Dissertation: Pamphlet Culture Date Due: 18 September 2015 Date Submitted: 11 September 2015 Extension granted: Authorised by: *Word limits include footnotes but not bibliographies Number of words* 16,090 and appendices. See handbook for further guidance. Markers: please read instructions to markers overleaf Markers’ Comments (to be returned to the student) Provisional Agreed Mark ___/100 1" Instructions to Essay Markers Page 1 is the main sheet for comments to be returned to the student. The comments and mark should be provided by the first marker in agreement with the second marker. The spaces below are for additional individual comments (NOT to be seen by the student) and marks. 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First Marker Comments Mark Awarded ___/100 Examiner Date Second Marker Comments Mark Awarded ___/100 Examiner Date AGREED MARK Date 2" The Wonderful Discoveries: English Witchcraft and Early Stuart Pamphlet Culture 1443356 Supervisor: Professor Sandra Clark Dissertation Submission for MA History of the Book September 2015 1 CONTENTS Introduction 2 Chapter 1: Witchcraft in Context 5 Chapter 2: Pamphlets and Materiality of Text 22 Chapter 3: The Wonderful Discoveries and the News 36 Conclusion 48 Figures 51 Bibliography 56 2 Introduction In 1715, nearly 250 years after Caxton first brought the printing press to England, Myles Davies published what Joad Raymond refers to as the ‘idiosyncratic and boisterous’ Eikon Mikro-Biblion, Or A Critical History of Pamphlets.1 Davies prefaces his Critical History by stating that ‘From Pamphlets may be learn’d the Genius of the Age, the Debates of the Learned, the Follies of the Ignorant, […] the Oversights of Statesmen, the Mistake of Courtiers, the different approaches of Foreigners, and the several encroachments of Rivals.’2 Evidently, the cheap and easily disseminated pamphlet form has been of interest to scholars for at least 300 years as a basis of many of our most enduring journalistic and literary traditions. By the final decades of the sixteenth century, the pamphlet form in England, and especially in London, was pervasive. The English book trade had come into its own during the Elizabethan period as Renaissance ideas percolated from continental Europe and carved out new markets for scholarly works and ecclesiastical texts in the vernacular. Fluctuating religious attitudes ensured a lively trade in ephemera – including pamphlets – that were used as a means of both public commentary and debate. Pamphleteers, by catering to a market beyond the elite, moved political, social, and cultural discussions out of familiar learned circles and into a newly evolving public sphere. The emergence of a public sphere and an increasingly literate middle class, or perhaps less controversially a more ‘middling sort’ including merchants, clerics, and civil servants, increased demand for written content exponentially. In particular, the market for cheap print expanded during this period in order to accommodate the growing demand for literary information and entertainment obtainable by the non-elite. The pamphlet form perfectly met 1 Joad Raymond, ‘Introduction: networks, communication, practice’, in Joad Raymond ed. News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1-17 (p. 1). 2 Myles Davies, ‘Eikon Mikro-Bibliom. Sive Icon Libellorum. Or, A Critical History of Pamphlets (London, 1715). Part I. Preface I. pp. 2-3. 3 the criteria of cheap and accessible and thus, as Sandra Clark attests, was the ‘first kind of literature to cater on any wide scale for the new and increasing audience of middle-class readers’.3 These popular pamphlets covered remarkably diverse subjects ranging from dramatic accounts of battles, to comprehensive sermons, to tales of monstrous births. Strange or aberrant crimes seem to have been exceptionally popular with a Jacobean audience, much as they are with readers today. Crimes of witchcraft and the subsequent trials – not uncommon in the early modern period but still remarkable – made particularly good pamphlet fodder since the accounts could be at once informative, entertaining, and sensational. This dissertation will focus on three early seventeenth-century witch-trial pamphlets; The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) by Thomas Potts, the anonymous The Wonderfull Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1619), and Henry Goodcole’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a witch, late of Edmonton, (1621). These works, collectively referred to throughout as the Wonderful Discoveries, represent a selection of pamphlets on witchcraft published in Jacobean London during the final twelve years of James I’s reign. The texts were not chosen as a random sample, but rather as a case study in the transitional nature of early-seventeenth century print culture. The first chapter of this dissertation will contextualize witchcraft in historical and literary contexts, and explore how the Wonderful Discovery tracts fit within this contemporary landscape of both literature and a popular social belief system. In the second chapter, I will consider the nature of early modern pamphlets more generally – including their readership, price, and contemporary cultural value. This chapter will also investigate the materiality of each Wonderful Discovery pamphlet, and consider how the material nature of 3 Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580-1640 (London: The Athlone Press, 1983), p. 18. 4 these works affected their contemporary meaning. The final chapter will place the tracts within the greater context of an emerging seventeenth-century news market, and explore the ways in which these works were responding to a growing public desire for reliable and accurate information. This dissertation aims to explore the ways in which the three Wonderful Discovery tracts both conform to ideas of early modern pamphlet culture and represent a transition in the popular literary landscape of the period. Though the authors were writing within certain perimeters of the well-established strange news and crime genres, they were also diverging from these norms and moving towards the realm of topical journalism; recounting important contemporary cases of witchcraft in immense detail. Each author, though utilizing the pamphlet form to ensure more widespread circulation, writes in an intelligent and engaging manner, impressing upon the reader both the excitement and gravity of the cases. These three witch-trial pamphlets are each provocative and informative – merging sensational storytelling and avid moralizing with claims of being authoritative news. The Wonderful Discovery pamphlets, in their content, form, and claims of authority, embody the early modern transition in the way that popular information was presented, communicated, and disseminated to the classes beyond the elite. 5 Witchcraft in Context Before delving into the material nature of these pamphlets and their place in the wider sphere of a developing news market, it is beneficial to consider the historical and literary context of witchcraft in the period more generally. It is easy for people today to disregard the European witch-hunts as testimony to the ignorance and trivial superstition of past societies. James Sharpe draws attention to what he sees as the problematic tendency for modern historians to regard early modern belief in the occult ‘as evidence of the credulity and barbarity of a past age’.4 In reality, the social, political, and economic factors behind early modern witchcraft beliefs are much more complex than a simple lack of knowledge or intelligence. Early scholars of witchcraft such as Matilda Joslyn Gage, Margaret Murray, and Montague Summers helped fuel these sensational and hyperbolic conceptions of the European ‘witch- craze’, including the frequently cited figure of 9 million witches executed from 1450-1750 in Gage’s book Women, Church, and State.5 Today, the accepted number of witchcraft executions throughout Europe and the British Isles during those three centuries is closer to 50,000 – a not insubstantial number but also not one indicative of unbridled witch-hunts.6 It is impossible now to reconstruct how the majority of people felt about witchcraft and whether they genuinely considered it a concern in their lives. However, Sharpe argues that belief in witchcraft was pervasive because it provided a means ‘of explaining the inexplicable’ and of ‘understanding human relationships’.7 An online search of the term ‘witches’ and ‘witch’ in the British Library’s English Short Title Catalogue indicates that 4 James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550-1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), p. 4. 5 Ibid., p. 9. 6 Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 175.; Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, p. 5. 7 Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, p. 12. 6 there were over 200 texts on witchcraft printed in English between 1575 and 1750,8 which strongly suggests that this was a topic of interest

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