Agnes Bowker's Cat

Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England
Erscheinungsjahr 2001
ISBN: 978-0-19-282530-8
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 364 Seiten, Format (B × H): 130 mm x 197 mm, Gewicht: 385 g

"What a world is this? It is marvelous, it is monstrous! I hear say there is a young woman, born in the town of Harborough, one Bowker, a butcher's daughter, which of late, God wot, is bought to bed of a cat, or have delivered a cat, or, if you will, is the mother of a cat! Oh God!"
William Bullein - Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence (1578)

David Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings-bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism-disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cressy, David

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder England, UK, Irland: Regional & Stadtgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- List of illustrations

- Introduction

- 1: Agnes Bowker's Cat: Childbirth, Seduction, Bestiality and Lies

- 2: Monstrous Births and Credible Reports: Portents, Texts and Testimonies

- 3: Mercy Gould and the Vicar of Cuckfield: Domestic and Clerical Pleading

- 4: Rose Arnold's Confession: Seduction, Deception and Distress in the Heart of England

- 5: The Essex Abortionist: Depravity, Sex and Violence

- 6: Another Midwife's Tale: Alcohol, Patriarchy and Childbirth in Early Modern London

- 7: Cross-Dressing in the Birth Room: Gender Trouble and Cultural Boundaries

- 8: Who Buried Mrs Horseman? Excommunication, Accommodation, and Silence

- 9: Mocking the Clergy: Wars of Words in Parish and Pulpit

- 10: The Atheists Sermon: Belief, Unbelief and Traditionalism in the Elizabethan North

- 11: Baptised Beasts and Other Travesties: Affronts to Rites of Passage

- 12: The Battle of the Altars: Turning the Tables and Breaking the Rails

- 13: The Portraiture of Prynne's Pictures: Performances on the Public Stage

- 14: The Downfall of Cheapside Cross: Vandalism, Ridicule and Iconoclasm

- 15: The Adamites Exposed: Naked Radicals in the English Revolution

- Conclusion

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

David Cressy is Professor of History at Ohio State University, USA