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the symptoms of demonic possession, seems to have drawn inspiration from the pamphlet account of the witches of Warboys: Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter, pp. 7–8, 135; Anon., The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys (London, 1593). 11 Purkiss, The Witch in History, p. 232. Ronald McFarland, ‘“The Hag is Astride”: Witches in Seventeenth-Century Literature’, The Journal of Popular Culture 11:1 (1977), 88–97, also comments that the play ‘is indeed sympathetic, though it is not altogether sceptical or enlightened’ (p. 91). 12
calls concepts of wholeness into question, the place of such concepts in critical discourse on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature remains curiously unaddressed. Cynthia Marshall, for example, implies the pre-existence of a concept of psychic wholeness in the suggestion that ‘a Renaissance literature of self-shattering’ offers readers and spectators ‘an experience of psychic fracture’. 12
histories, which generally contained succinct biographies of successive bishops, ancient and contemporary.7 These were not composed as chap 6 22/3/04 174 12:54 pm Page 174 FATHERS, PASTORS AND KINGS didactic works but principally as historical records. Yet their descriptions of particular bishops at times assumed a distinctly hagiographic tone and, if only for this reason, they will on occasion be cited in the course of this chapter. One of the most noticeable features of seventeenth-century literature on the office of bishop is its marked tendency to reflect the