The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children. Группа авторов

to his son – of what John was becoming. Nicholas was forced to watch his relationship with John being steadily undermined by John’s relationship with Edmund. And John seized on those aspects of magical belief that he could use to challenge his father and command Edmund’s attention. And so, for Nicholas, John’s natural rebelliousness evolved into something devilish. Nicholas had been betrayed not only by Edmund but also by John. John had been contaminated by Edmund’s evil. This demonization of John’s experience of magic was effective enough to convince John as well, not only at the time but for the rest of his life. Thirty-seven years later, in 1634, John Starkie had succeeded his great-uncle Roger Nowell as justice of the peace for the Pendle area. Rumours reached him that a young boy called Edmund Robinson was claiming that he had witnessed a gathering of witches – among them Alizon Device’s younger sister and half-brother, Jennet and William. John and his colleague Richard Shuttleworth had Edmund brought in for questioning and eventually sent 17 people to Lancaster to be tried for witchcraft. All were found guilty but were reprieved by the judge; but by the time an outside investigator had arrived, 4 had already died in the appalling conditions in Lancaster Gaol – Jennet Loynd, Alice Higgin and John Spencer and his wife.⁵² Gaol records show that two years later Jennet Device was still in prison – her fate, and that of the other suspects, is unknown.⁵³

      

       Figure 1.5A belief in contact with spirits was an essential part of magic – even pragmatic folk magic. © 2015 Joyce Froome. Used with permission.

      That is surely the worst horror of all – that Nicholas had turned John into someone who would eventually be responsible for the deaths of at least four people.

      Notes

1John Darrell, A True Narration of the Strange and Grievous Vexation by the Devil of Seven Persons in Lancashire (spelling modernized) (London: n.p., 1600). The sources for this case are this pamphlet by the exorcist John Darrell and another by his colleague George More, titled A True Discourse Concerning the Certain Possession and Dispossession of Seven Persons in One Family in Lancashire (spelling modernized) (London: n.p., 1600). Both pamphlets begin with a brief account of what happened before the exorcists’ arrival, based on information from Nicholas Starkie. There are reprints in John Ashton, The Devil in Britain and America (London: Ward & Downey, 1896); and Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

2More, True Discourse.

3Darrell, True Narration.

4More, True Discourse.

5Ibid.

6Unpublished manuscript from the library of the Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz. After his death in 2002 it was auctioned and is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (ms V.b.26 (2)).

7More, True Discourse.

8Albertus Magnus, attrib., ‘First Book, “Of the Virtues of Certain Herbs”’, in The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus (London: n.p., 1604).

9Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London: n.p., 1584), book 12, chapter 9.

10British Library MS Sloane 962; published in Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (spelling modernized) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 93.

11Darrell, True Narration.

12Ibid.

13Jonathan Lumby analyses the connection between the two cases (The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Lancaster: Carnegie, 1999)).

14More, True Discourse.

15Ibid.

16John Dee, A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits, ed. Meric Casaubon (London: n.p., 1659); Honorius of Thebes and the Angel Hocrohel, Liber Iuratus Honorii, ed. Gösta Hedegärd (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002). The artefacts are on display at the British Museum.

17Darrell, True Narration.

18More, True Discourse.

19Ibid.

20Darrell, True Narration.

21More, True Discourse.

22Ibid.

23Ibid.

24Ibid.

25Ibid.

26Darrell, True Narration.

27More, True Discourse.

28Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, ‘Book One, Chapter 1’, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. James Freake (London: n.p., 1651).

29Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2005).

30Honorius and Hocrohel, Liber Iuratus, 61; my translation. For the date, see Robert Mathiesen, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Ritual to Attain the Beatific Vision from The Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes’, in Conjuring Spirits, ed. Claire Fanger (Stroud: Sutton, 1998) 145–47.

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