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Signs and wonders in Britain's age of revolution. A sourcebook. Edited by Timothy G. Fehler and Abigail J. Hartman. Pp. viii + 314 incl. 27 ills. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £110. 978 1 138 49205 9

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Signs and wonders in Britain's age of revolution. A sourcebook. Edited by Timothy G. Fehler and Abigail J. Hartman. Pp. viii + 314 incl. 27 ills. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £110. 978 1 138 49205 9

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2020

Mark Stoyle*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
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Abstract

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Reviews
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

In this useful volume Timothy G. Fehler and Abigail J. Hartman reproduce a selection of thirty-five pamphlets with supernatural themes which were originally printed in England during the years between 1626 and 1659 and provide them with introductions and explanatory footnotes in order, as the editors nicely put it, to afford the twenty-first-century reader ‘an opportunity to get a sense of, if not to fully enter into, worldviews that are often jarring to a modern mind-set’. The book consists of seven thematically divided chapters. The first provides a general introduction to the way in which ‘perspectives on the supernatural were woven into the lives of those participating in … the tumultuous political and religious events of the mid-seventeenth century’. The second reproduces a series of pamphlets reporting on mysterious phenomena which had, allegedly, been observed in England, Ireland and Germany between 1626 and 1642: phenomena which many contemporaries interpreted as warnings of imminent disaster. The third and fourth chapters reproduce a series of pamphlets reporting on ‘signs and wonders’ which were published during the English Civil War – and devote particular attention to the complex ways in which Royalist and Parliamentarian polemicists sought to denigrate and undermine their enemies through the manipulation of supernatural motifs. The fifth chapter reproduces a series of post-war pamphlets relating to astrology and prophecy, while the sixth reproduces a set of publications which tell of the bizarre fates which had, apparently, befallen individuals of whose religious views the pamphlets’ authors disapproved. One of the most vivid of these includes the story of a religious conservative in pre-Civil War London who – after having cursed ‘the godly’ and defended the recent judicial mutilation of the Puritan agitators Prynne, Burton and Bastwick – found, to his horror and amazement, that his own ears had spontaneously begun to bleed. The final chapter reproduces a selection of miscellaneous post-war pamphlets which comment, inter alia, on the political prophecies uttered by a precocious infant found wrapped in swaddling clothes in a field in Herefordshire; on ‘a mayd’ suffering from the disease known as ‘the Kings Evill’ in Deptford whose health had been restored through the application of a handkerchief soaked in Charles i’s blood; and on various strange apparitions which had been glimpsed in the night skies over Bolton in February 1650. As the editors rightly observe, the most difficult task, when pulling together a compilation such as this, is to decide which texts to include and which to leave out – and some students of the period will doubtless be a trifle disappointed to see that their own particular favourites have been excluded. The selection which appears here is a representative and a well-judged one, however, while the editors’ comments on the texts themselves are extremely helpful: their point that ‘each pamphlet existed not as an isolated text but in dialogue with its immediate competitors, and with a wider literary tradition that included works both learned and popular’ is an especially important one to bear in mind.