‘To kill harmless cattle': Animal Victims and The Witch of Edmonton

The Witch of Edmonton (1621) is often viewed as a sceptical portrayal of witchcraft that offers a sympathetic view of the accused, but its accurate depiction of animal victims in events leading to accusations remains overlooked. This essay argues that witchcraft in early modern England was largely an animal crime. Following its source text, Henry Goodcole’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, A Witch (1621), and earlier prose accounts, The Witch of Edmonton illustrates the centrality of human-animal relations to the gendered dynamics and discourse of early modern witchcraft.

Prayer and Physic in Seventeenth-Century England

Historians have often represented prayer as an instrumental response to illness. We argue instead that prayer, together with physic, was part of larger regimes to preserve health and prevent disease. We focus on early modern England, through the philosophical writings of the physician, Robert Fludd, and the medical records of the clergyman, Richard Napier. Fludd depicted health as a fortress and illness as an invasion by demons; the physician counsels the patient in maintaining and restoring moral and bodily order. Napier documented actual uses of prayer. As in Fludd’s trope, through prayer, Napier and his patients enacted their aspiration for health and their commitment to a Christian order in which medicine only worked if God so willed it. Prayer, like physic, was a key part of a regime that the wise practitioner aimed to provide for his patients, and that they expected to receive from him.

Reforming the Holy Name: The Afterlife of the IHS in Early Modern England

This article challenges the prevailing understanding of the Holy Name of Jesus as largely a Roman Catholic representation in early modern England. Although the Holy Name was attacked intermittently by Protestant iconoclasts, the article uses both visual and literary texts to set out a more nuanced relationship between the symbol and the broader religious culture of the period. As a symbol, the IHS served as a polysemous representation in a period of religious turmoil, creating not only multiple meanings but also multiple contexts in which the symbol could be found. The article both addresses the reasons why scholars tend to see the IHS as a particularly Catholic symbol and demonstrates the continued importance of the Holy Name in Protestant devotion.