Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama & Culture

ISBN-13: 9781845193294 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 249 str.

Ryan Curtis Friesen

Opis

This work explores the varieties of scepticism and belief exhibited by a selection of philosophers and playwrights from the 16th and 17th centuries, including Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton. It explicates how each author defines the supernatural, whether they assume magic to operate in the world, and how they use occult principles to explain what can be known and what is ethical. Each chapter in this volume evaluates whether a chosen early modern author is endorsing magic as efficacious or divinely sanctioned, or criticizing it for being fraudulent or unholy. This book also sets out to determine what historical sources provided given authors with knowledge of the occult and speculates on how aware an audience would have been of academic, classical, or popular contexts surrounding the text at hand.