The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England

Darren Oldridge

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317278191
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Weltgeschichte

The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England reflects upon the boundaries between the natural and the otherworldly in early modern England as they were understood by the people of the time. The book places supernatural beliefs and events in the context of the English Reformation to show how early modern people reacted to the world of unseen spirits and magical influences. It sets out the conceptual foundations of early modern encounters with the supernatural, and shows how occult beliefs penetrated almost every aspect of life.

Darren Oldridge considers many of the spiritual forces that pervaded early modern England: an immanent God who sometimes expressed Himself through 'signs and wonders' and the various lesser inhabitants of the world of spirits including ghosts, goblins, demons and angels. He explores human attempts to comprehend, harness or accommodate these powers through magic and witchcraft, and the role of the supernatural in early modern science.

This book presents a concise and accessible up-to-date synthesis of the scholarship of the supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England. It will be essential reading for students of early modern England, religion, witchcraft and the supernatural.

1
Introduction

What is supernatural?

To write a history of the supernatural is, inevitably, to reflect on the boundaries of the natural world and the forces that operate within it. When the alchemist Thomas Vaughan published in 1650 his history of magic, Magia Adamica, or, The Antiquitie of Magic, he was careful to distinguish between good and corrupted forms of the art: the former was a gift of God transmitted from the time of Adam, and the latter a perverse tradition encouraged by the Devil. Thirty years earlier, Walter Raleigh had delineated “natural” and “demonic” magic in his History of the World (1616).¹ For these and other early modern thinkers, the history of the occult involved a series of important distinctions: between earthly phenomena and those produced by otherworldly powers, and the various forces and spiritual entities that were active in the world.

A modern historian of these things is obliged to address similarly fundamental issues. The definition of the “supernatural” itself is an obvious place to start. The concept of events “above nature” (supra naturam) was accepted in the early Christian church, and the word supernaturalis was first used commonly in the thirteenth century. This implied a boundary between ordinary phenomena and direct acts of God. The word emerged in the context of new procedures for canonisation within the medieval church: these required the examination of miracles that were attributed to presumptive saints and that turned on the question of whether such events involved the suspension of natural processes.² A true miracle, it was believed, contravened the laws of nature and could be accomplished only by the divine hand that had created these laws. Consequently, the investigation of supposed occurrences of this kind required the demarcation of natural and supernatural phenomena.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea that only miracles were truly “above nature” was dominant among European intellectuals. In the words of the Elizabethan theologian William Perkins, “a true wonder is a rare work done by the power of God simply, either above or against the power of nature, and it is properly called a miracle”.³ This meant that conventional thinking about the supernatural was, in some ways, similar to that accepted by many westerners today. The overwhelming majority of things were believed to have natural causes, and apparent contraventions of nature were unexpected and extremely rare. This superficial similarity, however, conceals a gulf in understanding between early modern people and ourselves. This was because our predecessors believed in a hidden world of spirits and powers that were active on earth. These included good and wicked angels as well as the “occult” or invisible forces associated with magic. Very few educated people questioned the existence of these things, and those who did – such as the English demonologist Reginald Scot and the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes – placed themselves beyond the mainstream of respectable and credible opinion.⁴

The boundaries between natural and supernatural phenomena have never been securely fixed, and have moved since Raleigh and Vaughan wrote their histories of magic in the seventeenth century. To most of their contemporaries, the activities of spirits, as well as the effects produced by human magicians, were contained within the laws established by God for His creation: they were entirely natural. The fact that people did not understand the means by which angels and demons did remarkable things, such as lifting witches into the sky, made these acts not supernatural but “preternatural”: that is, they were accomplished within the laws of nature, but their mechanism was outside human knowledge. Here a modern analogy may be helpful. Scientists today accept that many functions of the human brain are unknown, and some may never be fully understood; nonetheless, they do not assume that such phenomena are “above nature”. Early modern thinkers applied similar reasoning to events like the flight of witches: the principles of nature governed earthly phenomena, even when these principles were not understood by human observers. True miracles were the only exception to this rule.

This way of thinking can be illustrated in the writings of Simon Forman, a magician who established a considerable reputation as a healer and astrologer in late Elizabethan and Jacobean London.⁵ In 1594 Forman survived an outbreak of plague in the city and became convinced that he could both cure the disease and explain its causes. He was careful, however, to distinguish between the “natural” and “supernatural” origins of the affliction. The former involved the alignment of the planets, particularly Saturn and Mars: the transit of these heavenly bodies was already associated with earthly calamities such as warfare and famine, and this could be extended to pestilence as well. It was possible to anticipate and deal with such natural plagues through the methods of astrology. But at other times plague was sent by God as a judgement or warning to humankind. “If they come of a supernatural cause”, Forman explained, “then they come by the will and anger of God and by His command and ordinance, which is above and beyond the course of nature, for He is the lord of nature”.⁶ A supernatural plague could not be relieved by any natural art or medicine.

To twenty-first-century readers, of course, both of Forman’s explanations for plague appear to be supernatural. This reflects the shifting border between the natural and the supernatural in western thought. For the purposes of this book, it will be necessary to define the supernatural in terms broader than those that were used by men such as Forman in Elizabethan England. Scholars of the early modern period often describe the deeds attributed to otherworldly beings such as saints and angels, the Devil and demons, as “supernatural” when they were understood by contemporaries as remarkable but natural events. In effect, this practice extends the category of the supernatural to the preternatural as well. I shall follow this convention. To do otherwise would confine this book to the study of miracles, and exclude many important and fascinating phenomena that today are routinely described as supernatural.

The supernatural in history

English historians writing in the sixteenth century were comfortable with marvels. Both John Bale and John Foxe recorded supernatural events to underline the divine favour enjoyed by Protestant martyrs. In a world ruled by divine providence, men and women could endure appalling executions without pain; and tumults in the sky could mark the significance of their deaths. At the burning of Ann Askew, the heavens “suddenly altered colour, and the clouds from above gave a thunder-clap” to display “the high displeasure of God for so tyrannous a murder”.⁷ In Foxe’s life of William Tyndale, the martyr annulled the power of a magician at a banquet in Antwerp.⁸ While the Book of Martyrs remains a standard source for writers on the early English Reformation, few if any modern historians take such accounts at face value. This is because the scientific naturalism that dominates western societies – at least at the level of public culture – appears to preclude otherworldly interventions from historical discussion. In the 1960s, E. H. Carr argued that supernatural powers should not be granted a role in shaping historical events; nor should the meaning of the past depend on some higher purpose akin to providence. This was because such beliefs lifted certain events beyond the normal rules of cause and effect on which historians based their interpretations, and undermined the autonomy of their discipline. Religion in history was like a joker in a pack of cards, and for Carr “history is a game played… without a joker in the pack”.⁹

The Reformation historian Brad Gregory has challenged this approach. Gregory sees a danger in assuming that the supernatural experiences described by women and men in deeply religious past cultures cannot have been real. This assumption, he suggests, resembles the writing of “confessional history” that once dominated accounts of early modern religion, in which scholars produced partisan narratives to support the religious traditions to which they belonged. This practice has been largely abandoned, but historians today often impose secular interpretations on their material and consequently create versions of the past that their human sources would not have recognised. This has a built-in tendency to distort the events that they are trying to understand. Gregory admits that this problem cannot be completely overcome. It can be alleviated considerably, however, by beginning historical enquiries with the question “What did it mean to them?” This obliges historians to suspend their own preconceptions and resist the desire to impose a reductionist theory of “what really happened”. It also encourages understanding of the motives of people in the past, which played a fundamental role in shaping historical events.¹⁰

The approach of this book is broadly consistent with Gregory’s views. As far as possible, the question of whether people can truly interact with angels and demons, or whether a martyr’s death can produce a God-sent thunderclap, will be set aside. It should be acknowledged, however, that this approach is not without its problems: indeed, it is really a holding position. E. H. Carr’s assertion that historians should not, in the pursuit of their discipline, accept the existence of supernatural forces that contravene the ordinary processes of causation remains telling; there should be no joker in the pack. To be a historian is to accept precisely the secular assumptions that Gregory finds problematic – at least when one is doing history. The philosopher Tor Egil Førland has made this point in response to Gregory’s argument. He has also observed that the historian’s goal is ultimately to explain the past: the question “What did it mean to them?” may be a useful step in this process, but the question “What happened?” cannot be deferred indefinitely. Ultimately, Førland suggests that it is impossible for modern historians to produce interpretations of supernatural events that would be recognised as accurate by those who experienced them: this is a problem, he admits, but it is one that we must live with.¹¹

The issue, ultimately, may be one of priorities. To understand completely an incident in the past that was perceived as supernatural, it is not enough to grasp what it meant to those who experienced it: it is also necessary to explain the incident itself.¹² Did God mark the death of Ann Askew with a miraculous storm? Carr and Førland would say that historians should discount this possibility in order to do their job properly; and they are probably correct. Nonetheless, it is usually more helpful to ask Brad Gregory’s question: what did the storm mean to those who witnessed it, and to the many more who knew the story through ballads and books? This is because the attempt to describe religious phenomena in naturalistic terms adds little to the kind of explanations that historians normally want: that is, explanations that take seriously the ideas of men and women in the past and acknowledge the role of these ideas in shaping events. Those who wish to explain the religious wars of the sixteenth century, for example, would gain little by concentrating on the psychological and sociological origins of religion. These things may be part of the total picture; but they are hardly a priority. Similarly, the best questions to ask about the supernatural in early modern England are questions about meaning. The supernatural beliefs of Tudor and Stuart people are best understood from within their own frame of reference, and this involves the deferral, as far as possible, of less immediate questions about whether these beliefs were true.

The marvels described by Bale and Foxe, and similar wonders that proliferated in Elizabethan and Stuart England, belonged to a world of meaning that is worth understanding in its own right. This world of meaning also framed other events, such as the reform of popular culture, the rise and decline of witch trials, and the religious conflicts that culminated in the English civil wars. By approaching the supernatural beliefs of the period on their own terms, it becomes easier to explain the actions of the men and women who participated in these events.

Thinking with spirits

How did the world of unseen spirits and magical influences affect Tudor and Stuart thought? Here it is necessary to lay aside modern assumptions about the supposed irrationality and “superstition” of the past. English magicians like John Dee and Simon Forman, experts on angels such as John Salkeld and Henry Lawrence, and demonologists like Richard Bernard and John Gaule lived in a world largely untouched by what would later be called “scientific rationalism”; but this did not make their ideas and arguments irrational.¹³ As the historian Stuart Clark has shown, it was possible to adopt carefully logical positions on a subject such as witchcraft within the parameters of early modern assumptions.¹⁴ Nor did belief in spirits preclude sceptical enquiry. Indeed, English writers on maleficium – the harmful magic attributed to witches – were normally cautious in their evaluation of the available evidence, while they accepted in principle that occult forces could inflict suffering on individuals and that demons were a...