Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London - Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (Hardcover, New Ed Of 1603 Ed)

Edward Jorden has been hailed as one of the earliest champions of rational scepticism, a heroic figure who perceived that the symptoms his credulous contemporaries attributed to witchcraft were actually the effects of hysteria. His "Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother" (1603) is said to have reclaimed the demoniacally possessed for medicine and to have introduced the concept of hysteria into English psychiatry. The aim of this book is to reassess the reasons why Jorden wrote his famous pamphlet and to set it in its historical context. This book brings Jorden's pamphlet together with two works by Jorden's adversaries, John Swann's "A True and Brief Report of Mary Glovers Vexation" and Stephen Bradwell's "Mary Glovers Late Woeful Case", which has never before been published. Both of these concern the incident that provoked Jorden's "Briefe Discourse", and they show that his pamphlet was in fact prompted by a bitter religious and political controversy over the case. The introduction, by Michael MacDonald, carefully reconstructs the fascinating story of the bewitchment of Mary Glover, a 14 year-old London girl, and the intrigues that surrounded it. MacDon