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Description of  Afterlives of Endor: Witchcraft, Theatricality, and Uncertainty from the 'Malleus Maleficarum' to Shakespeare

Afterlives of Endor offers an analysis of the way early modern English literature addressed the period's anxieties about witchcraft and theatricality. What determined whether or not a demonologist imagined a trial as a spectacle? What underlying epistemological constraints governed such choices and what conceptions of witchcraft did these choices reveal? Pairing readings of demonological texts with canonical plays and poetry, Laura Levine examines such questions. Through analyses of manuals and pamphlets about the prosecution of witchesincluding Reginald Scot's skeptical The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), King James VI/I's Daemonologie (1597), and Jean Bodin's De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1580)Afterlives of Endor examines the way literary texts such as Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, Spenser's Read more