A Literary Link between Thomas Shadwell and Christian Felix Weisse

PMLA ◽  
1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 808-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred E. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sort It ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
The Witch

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

Blood the Witch, Swim the Wizard

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-37
Author(s):  
Thomas Waters
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Masses

This chapter shows that in early 1800s Britain, witchcraft was widely believed in. Magical traditions, traceable to the period of the witch trials and before, were strong. Villagers and townsfolk ducked, mobbed, attacked, and bullied witches. Privately, many sophisticated and wealthy people sympathised. Not with victims of superstitious violence, but with the perpetrators. Indeed, witchcraft troubled many well-to-do folk during the early 1800s. This chapter explores a remarkable area of common ground between the masses, the upper classes, and those in the middle. More often than one might expect, they agreed with each other: sorcery was real, and witches deserved to be punished.

scholarly journals “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”: Witches, Familiars, and Human-Animal Interactions in the English Witch Trials

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

This article explores the role played by the relationship between witch and familiar in the early modern witch trials. It positions animal familiars at the intersection of early modern belief in witchcraft and magic, examining demonologies, legal and trial records, and print pamphlets. Read together, these sources present a compelling account of human-animal interactions during the period of the witch trials, and shed light upon the complex beliefs that created the environment in which the image of the witch and her familiar took root. The animal familiar is positioned and discussed at the intersection of writing in history, anthropology, folklore, gender, engaging with the challenge articulated in this special issue to move away from mono-causal theories and explore connections between witchcraft, magic, and religion.

The ‘U’ and ‘V’ Alternation in the History of English

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-49
Author(s):  
Peter J. Grund ◽  
Matti Peikola ◽  
Johanna Rastas ◽  
Wen Xin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Constrained System ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Phonetic Value ◽  
Consonant Sounds ◽  
Mixed Systems

In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters <u> and <v> went through a change from a positionally constrained system (initial <v>, medial <u>) to a system based on phonetic value, with <u> marking vowel and <v> consonant sounds. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a dataset of ca. 4,000 examples from over 100 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, MA, in 1692–1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the <u> and <v> usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between <u> and <v>, from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.

Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692

1996 ◽  
Vol 109 (432) ◽  
pp. 209
Author(s):  
Moria Smith ◽  
Bernard Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Story Reading ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
The Witch

scholarly journals Mulier Striga, documento atribuido a Bartolo de Sassoferrato. ¿Primera piedra medieval para el retrato de la bruja?

Medievalismo ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 273-301
Author(s):  
Eva LARA ALBEROLA
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Witch

In this article we delve into de consilium entitled Mulier striga, attributed to Bartolo de Sassoferrato and dated between 1331-1334. We contribute to spread the fact it is a forgery and that its author was Giovanni Battista Piotti, a sixteenth-century lawyer, a fact hardly known by many specialists who continue to present the texto as medieval. On the other hand, we will analyze in detail the portrait ot the witch present in this work, never examined by the experts before, in order to determine whether the picture offered is anachronistic, as it happens with other aspects of the document, or matches the beliefs of the first half of the fourteenth century. En este artículo profundizamos en el consilum Mulier striga, atribuido a Bartolo de Sassoferrato y fechado entre 1331-1334. Contribuimos a difundir el hecho de que se trata de una falsificación y que su autor fue Giovanni Battista Piotti, jurista del siglo XVI; cuestión apenas conocida por muchos especialistas que siguen presentando el texto como medieval. Por otra parte, analizaremos pormenorizadamente el retrato de la bruja presente en este escrito, no abordado por los expertos, con el fin de determinar si la imagen ofrecida es anacrónica, como sucede con otros aspectos del documento, o se ajusta a la primera mitad del siglo XIV.

The Paradoxical Faust Cantatas of Adrian Leverkühn and Alfred Schnittke

2019 ◽  
pp. 220-240
Author(s):  
Charles McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Alfred Schnittke ◽  
Doctor Faustus

The Russian composer Alfred Schnittke’s Faust cantata, Seid nüchtern und wachet (Be sober and watch), remarkably parallels the fictional work of the hero of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus). Mann’s novel is a retelling of the sixteenth-century Faust story in the light of the history of German music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The central character, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, navigates the currents of social and artistic unrest. The fictional composer’s last work was the cantata D. Fausti Weheklag (The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus) with a text drawn from the 1587 Spies Faust Book. One of the first readers of Mann’s novel, Schnittke patterned much of his own life on his fictional counterpart. The main characteristic of both Schnittke’s and Leverkühn’s cantatas is a pervasive sense of paradox.

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