Volume 53, Number 7 · April 27, 2006
Speak of the Devil
By Keith Thomas
Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
by Malcolm Gaskill
Harvard University Press, 364 pp., $29.95
Remember Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day
by James Sharpe
Harvard University Press, 230 pp., $19.95
At a time when many people in Europe and North America believe themselves to be under threat from a hidden enemy bent on their annihilation, it is worth reflecting on the existence of similar fears four hundred years ago. Like the United States today, seventeenth-century England was an intellectually stratified society whose inhabitants lived at very different levels of mental sophistication. It witnessed the superlative achievements of William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, but it also saw Roman Catholics persecuted as agents of Antichrist and old women put to death as malevolent witches.
Review, 4287 words
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