Magic and the material culture of healing in early modern England

This dissertation questions how people used objects to preserve health and cure illness in early modern England. Each chapter focuses on a different object or group of objects, to make interventions in the history of contemporary healing, and to demonstrate what we can learn about early modern healing from a study that places things at the centre. I bring together items that vary according to material, size, shape, function and application, to reveal the diverse range of things used for cure and protection in this period. Some were everyday, relatively worthless things, while others were expensive, coveted rarities, and I use both types of object to investigate the complex relationship between value and power. Throughout, this thesis explores how modern research, and trends of collecting and categorisation, have affected our interpretation of the physical evidence of early modern healing, and shows how objects can be resituated within medical contexts. It analyses how and why learned, elite men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries criticised what they saw as erroneous medical belief and practice, and the crucial role played by objects in these condemnations. In comparison, it examines how, despite religious and societal changes, laypeople continued to use a variety of healing objects, even in the face of theological denunciation and diabolical threat. My research contributes to recent scholarship that advocates object-focused histories, and provides a model of how to examine objects on their own terms, regardless of whether or not textual evidence exists. As a study of magic and the material culture of healing, it contributes to histories of household medicine, recipes and secrets, magic, ritual, superstition, demonology and witchcraft, medical politics, curiosity and wonder, and collecting.Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Studentshi

Science in neo-Victorian poetry

This article considers the work of three contemporary poets and their engagement, in verse, with Victorian science. Beginning with the outlandish ‘theories’ of Mick Imlah’s ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ (1983), it moves on to two works of biografiction – Anthony Thwaite’s poem ‘At Marychurch’ (1980), which outlines Philip Henry Gosse’s doomed attempts to unite evolution and Christianity, and Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009). Starting off with John Glendening’s idea that science in neo-Victorian fiction, if fully embraced, provides an opportunity for self-revelation to characters, this article explores the rather less happy resolutions of each of these poems, while in addition discussing the ways in which these poems perform the formal changes and mutability discussed within them

Exploring critical literacy with pre-service teachers: An example from Australia

This paper intends to present a suggestion of how to practice critical literacy with pre-service teachers (PSTs), and their students, in order to fulfill the aims of the Australian Curriculum of English. Therefore, using notions of systemic-functional grammar found in Halliday (2004), Halliday & Hasan (1976), Halliday & Matthiessen (2014), and Martin (1992), we analyze a set of nine newspaper articles related to gender issues, social behavior and adequacy at the workplace. By discussing structure of that genre (narrative with an Orientation, Complications and a final Resolution), grammatical performance (Modality, nominalization, cohesion, voices of verb), and their implications in the social use of language, we point out ways through which our choices regarding textual configuration and the linguistic system are used to achieve certain communicational purposes. In this sense, we demonstrate how useful is, to the speaker, acquiring grammar knowledge, so he/she can have the right to active participation in post-modern societies, arguing and evaluating the other’s arguments

What is a “Witch Bottle”? Assembling the Textual Evidence from Early Modern England

Sometime around 1670, a ballad entitled A miraculous cure for witchcraft, or, Strange news from the Blew-Boar in Holburn was anonymously printed. It told the story of a girl bewitched not far from London, who was “vext in Body, and perplex in mind.” After trying countless remedies, the girl and her friends finally found a “chymist,” well known for his art and skill. He told them to take the bewitched girl’s urine, put it in a bottle with some other “ingredients,” and then bury it in a dunghill, not to be touched or meddled with at all; this would cut the witch’s charms. Sure enough, after following these instructions and waiting eagerly by the hill all night, the witch appeared looking “swell’d” and demanding the bottle. The girl and her friends refused this request, the witch left and died, and the bewitched girl immediately began to recover. In this ballad, a chymical physician instructed the girl how to make a “witch bottle” to cure her bewitchment, though he did not label it as such. This curative procedure was written about by various contemporary authors, including elite, educated men, but its existence in ballad form shows how it was also known about by a broad spectrum of society