Author: Hyrum Higgins

In Magic in Early Modern England: Literature, Politics, and Supernatural Power, Andrew Moore contests Max Weber’s famous “disenchantment of the world” thesis and argues that the advent of modernity did not see belief in magic fade in the wake of rationalist perspectives. Instead Moore contends that interest in magic spiked in early modern times and argues that rather this was bolstered by modernist trends rather than opposed to them.

Andrew Moore is an associate professor of Great Books at Saint Thomas University. Moore has a PhD in English Language and Literature and he specializes in renaissance literature. He has had an interdisciplinary focus on his work dating back to his undergraduate when he dual-majored in English and interdisciplinary studies. Accordingly, Magic in Early Modern England is itself a hybrid work. Moore analyzes his source base of Early Modern English literature to get at a broader point about Early Modern English culture and ideologies.

Moore begins his work by describing the paradigmatic thesis proposed by Max Weber in that he is responding to. In his lecture, Science as a Vocation, [1] Weber associated magic with a primitive mysticism characteristic of the medieval world. As science replaced magic, so too did it replace the systems of meaning associated with a premodern mystical worldview. Moore argues that this argument relies on the idea that magic is necessarily mystical, which he contests.

Moore argues that the ends of magic were generally both material and practical. He writes that “The impulse to magic in early modern literature and early modern society more broadly is an impulse toward controlling nature, an impulse to escape the limitations of the human condition, and, in extreme cases, to enslave or subjugate the world to one’s will.” (16)  He argues that “Both magic and science need to be understood as parallel enterprises that were concerned with this ambition.” (48) Magic-users sought to heal, harm, bring fortune, and make decisions that had bearing on the material world.

Moore also argues for the the affinity between Early Modernity and magic through examples of Early Modern Writers who argued that magic was part of the natural world. Moore references an account of a 1696 witch trial in which the author theorized that the witch may have used optical illusions and “speaking trumpets” to perform her acts of wickedness. (47-49) Moore argues that some saw magic “as misunderstood things that the new science will make clear and perhaps even possible to replicate.” While these anecdotes demonstrate the part of Moore’s thesis that Early Modern thinkers often approached magic from a rationalist perspective, it is less convincing, in that, in these cases, it is not clear that the thinkers really saw the abilities they investigated as supernatural. Nevertheless, these examples do show the blurred lines between magic and science.

But many early modern figures believed in magic straightforwardly, and throughout his book, Moore gives many examples of the degrees to which magic was ubiquitous in the society and argues that even realist political philosophers might also practice necromancy. (55)

Another trend of Early Modern thought that Moore covers is those who were skeptical of magic’s veracity but took belief in it seriously. Moore points out that in Thomas’ Hobbes’ Leviathan, Hobbes’ explicitly speaks about the unreality of magic, but still calls for the punishment of witches as dangerous individuals to society. (155) Moore argues that even skeptics were deeply involved and connected to the world of magic around them. This argument is more weakly aligned with Moore’s thesis, as the engagement of rationalist figures with the magical beliefs around them does not indicate that such beliefs were aligned with theirs.

Moore’s thesis reminds me of the arguments of Paul Griffith in Information, Institutions, and Local Government in England: 1550-1700. Like Moore, Griffiths argues against a prominent academic’s foundational thesis about modernity. Foucault argued that modernity brought a variety of changes to systems of authority ranging from shifts from public to private, corporal to psychological, and reputation to data. [2] Griffiths describes these changes as “turning inward” and argues that Foucault implies that this changes happened in late modernity and could be contrasted starkly with early modern times, but that they actually occurred earlier and more gradually. [3] Moore similarly contests Weber’s thesis that modernity brought disbelief in magic by highlighting the ubiquity of magic in Early Modern England.  

However Moore goes farther than Griffiths in contesting the foundational historiography and argues that the advent of modernity actually drove an obsession with magic. This is a different type of argument about modernity than Griffith’s and reminds me more of Lloyd Bowen’s argument in his book Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean English: Gentry Honour, Violence, and the Law. Bowen argues against a historiography that sees private violence dwindling in the wake of an expanded legal system in Early Modern England. Bowen argues that the Early Modern increase in litigation actually drove an upswing in private violence instead of replacing it. [4] This is more similar to Moore’s argument about modernity. Nevertheless, all three works serve as examples of a historiographical trend of complicating the boundaries and assumptions of what modernity meant.

Moore concludes his work by arguing that Early Modern thinkers “were fascinated with magic because they were fascinated with questions about human power and natural limits.” (152) He argues that this fascination was core to the project of modernity and that even the skeptics built upon it. Rather than representing a rejection of magic, Moore argues that modernity represented a fulfillment of it.

 While Moore makes a compelling argument about the material aims of magic, he does not show the causality as strongly as I might have liked. Nevertheless, he successfully showcases myriad ways one in which the boundaries between magic and science were thin in Early Modern England.

[1]  Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1946, 382–94, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25249-7_17. 

[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 2012).

[3] Paul Griffiths, Information, Institutions, and Local Government in England, 1550-1700: Turning Inside (OUP Oxford, 2024).

[4] Lloyd Bowen, Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), 9.

In Information Institutions and Local Government in Early Modern England, Paul Griffiths challenges Foucault’s assumptions about the advent of societal patterns associated with modernity. He argues that as early as the 1600s  there was a “turning inward” in which officials shifted from a focus on “public/visual representations of authority or ‘manifestaccon’” and instead increasingly used more internal information-based approaches that aimed for “precyson.” (1) He argues that while these processes have often been associated with top-down centralization, they actually occurred from the bottom-up as a result of the actions of countless middling officials seeking to improve their localities. 

Paul Griffiths is a professor of history at Iowa State University, hailing from Liverpool. He has specialized in the history of crime and authority in Early Modern England with a focus on London. This is his third book. 

Information is primarily a work of social and cultural history. It could be seen as either a bottom-up or top-down approach as it is focused on structures of government composed of middle-class officials and utilizes sources in a way more commonly found in bottom-up histories. He utilizes records of crimes, censuses, investigations, punishments, and various statistical records to show attitudes and practices around information and governance.

The book is written with a clear dialogue with Foucault, and the author repeatedly draws attention to this. Specifically, Griffiths engages with Discipline and Punish; Foucault began that work with the dramatic story of the torture and dismemberment of a regicide in 1757. He contrasted that brutal public destruction of a person’s body with modern methods of punishment; Foucault argued that modern punishment was no longer public, and rather than punishing the body, sought to reform the person’s soul. 

While Griffiths does not necessarily contest the dynamics of what Foucault describes, he does contest his timeline. Griffith argues that it was not an “abrupt leap” between torturous public punishment and private incarceration. (289)  Rather, he argues that the two forms of punishment coexisted for centuries and that private punishment was actually more common than public punishment after 1550. (171) He adds to this by describing the heavy early modern usage of “maidenwells,” early prisons that existed not just for punishment, but for reformation. He also contests the distinction between private and public more generally, arguing, for example, that questions about the public were often decided in private spaces. (288) In contesting a historiography about an emerging hegemony of the public sphere, Griffiths joins historian  Lloyd Bowen. In Bowen’s Anatomy of a Duel, Bowen argues against the concept that increased legalism in England went hand in hand with a shift from private violence to public justice within a process of modernization. By highlighting the reciprocal relationship between family feuds and litigation, Bowen also emphasizes the coexistence of the public and private sphere in Early Modern England “question[s] our tendency to distinguish law and violence by their relationship to a supposedly unbelligerent ‘modernity.’” [2]

In addition to Griffith’s argument about the early and gradual process of the English government “turning inside,” he contests the method by which that process occurred. Griffith argues that contrary to a historiography that associates increased information gathering systems with centralization, it instead stemmed from the decentralized actions of local officials to solve local problems. Griffiths argues that these officials shared ideologies including that of “precyson.” By this he means a desire to identify and quantify in an exact and truthful way. (11) To show this he gives various examples of the questions that officials asked in the course of their duties. Two that he finds especially important are “Who are you?” and “What are you?” (14) Through questions, papers, and tests, officials sought to both identify peoples’ identity (who they were), but also to identify what role they played in society (what they were). When they asked these questions, they intended to follow up with actions.

Griffiths argues that middling officials were deeply concerned about what they saw as the degradation of society. He argues that there was an actual increase in crime in the period in which they lived and that they perceived it that way. (7) Griffiths sees the catalyst as being the rapid growth of urban areas that was occurring at this time which brought with it crowded cities, foreigners, beggars, theft, fraud, violence, and prostitution. Officials sought to deal with these changes first by classifying them with precision. Then they sought to deal with the problems that they classified through a variety of methods including whipping, jailing, removing, dunking, and branding.  Through these methods, officials sought both to reform troublemakers, but also, they sought to remove them from society. 

This removal fit with the purposes of manifestaccon, or the visual projection of authority in pursuit of honor, beauty, cleanliness, and order.  Officials believed that these aesthetic criteria were connected to moral decay. (68) Because of this they sought to regulate their surroundings through cleaning, repairing, decorating, and as mentioned above, physical removal.

Griffiths emphasizes that Early Modern officials aimed for perfection in their information gathering and enforcing of standards, but acknowledges that rather than a utopian vision, it was more like “a permanent condition or strategy that defined governance.” (31) He argued that the manifestaccon approach to governance never really went away, “but that age-old intense and regulatory identity-authority-politics has all but disappeared from ‘official’ scripts” as institutions turned inward. 

Griffiths tone throughout the work is one of deep skepticism and cynicism towards the information, institutions, and local governments in Early Modern England that he covers. He succeeds in showing the Early Modern antecedents of Foucault’s panopticon, but perhaps one weakness of his work is that in the process he paints a picture of Early Modern England that appears more like a managerial surveillance state than it actually was. This is less in the details that Griffiths does include and more in his tone and what he doesn’t include. He rarely emphasizes the ways in which the Early Modern world was significantly less precise and less private than the contemporary world. 

While he may have overstated his case at times, Griffiths adds significantly to the historiography by showing the early history of processes that are essential to our understanding of modernity institutions. While Griffith’s book is frequently excessively wordy and difficult to read (like Foucault), it is also engrossing. Griffith succeeds at giving a glimpse into the worldview of local English leaders in Early Modern times and effectively shows the impact of the structures and methods they created.

[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 2012). 

[2] Lloyd Bowen, Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), 9.

Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law was written in 2021 by Lloyd Bowen, a professor of early modern history at Cardiff University. His research has focused on political and religious history centered on early modern Wales. Anatomy of a Duel is his third book.

The book is a microhistory that focuses on the events and context leading up to a duel between John Egerton and Edward Morgan in 1610 in the north Welsh marches. Bowen argues that the historiography around dueling is that the practice of dueling in England represented an early-modern shift away from medieval forms of personal violence such as feuds and trials of combat. Historians such as Mervyn James have argued that as English nobles became “demilitarized,” the state grew to have a monopoly on violence, and noble disputes were increasingly resolved with lawsuits rather than violence. Within this model, dueling was an exceptional response to the process of modernization that otherwise reduced elite violence. (2)

Bowen argues that this characterization is incorrect for two reasons. First, he challenges the idea that violence actually decreased within the English gentry during the early modern period. (8) Second, he argues that the barrier placed by historians between medieval feuds and early modern duels is artificial; elite feuds continued after the Middle Ages, and duels could result from them. (9) Bowen presents the Egerton/Morgan duel as a culminating example of a feud between gentry families as well as an example of how lawsuits did not always replace elite violence; not only could legal and physical battles coexist together, they could also feed and intensify each other.

To make this argument, Bowen makes heavy use of legal sources. He uses the court records of the various complaints and suits the two families brought against each other, but also uses reports from the coronial investigation into the central duel. Bowen notes that coronial investigations are less commonly used by historians because details from them were generally discarded after cases were tried. However, in the case of the Egerton/Morgan duel, records of the investigation survived, and Bowen argues that they offer both a more personal record of the duel, but also an insight into how coronial investigations functioned generally. (10) This fits into Bowen’s additional goal with his book. He wants to investigate the details of what happened between the Egertons and Morgans, but as records are fickle, the book is also focused on the legal processes themselves that both families used in their struggle. Nevertheless, despite the ambiguities inherent in legal records, his creative analysis of the records yields a plausible and rich picture of the events that culminated in a fight to the death.

One of the strengths of Bowen’s investigation is that he starts his story generations before the duel begins. He examines the genealogies of the families involved. The feud is really as much between the Egertons and the Mostyns as it is with the Morgans, but he shows how all three families were connected by blood. When combined with legal records showcasing the expanding lands and fortunes of the families as well as their perceived relationships.  Bowen creates a rich chronology of the three families. While it is impossible to know for sure the motives behind the feud, Bowen uses this chronology to suggest the possible goals, connections, and frustrations of the three families. For example, Bowen sketches out the relationship between Sir John Egerton and Piers Mostyn through records showing that Piers was guardian over Sir John as a youth (34), descriptions that Piers had “‘inward especiall love and affection’” towards his nephew (35), critiques by Sir John’s enemies that Sir John had been using his residence in a different county to skirt the law in Piers’s favor (37), and Piers’s statement that “‘the devell should have his lands before William Moston his brother.’” (37) Taken together, Bowen tells a story of a nephew who had close personal and business ties with his uncle. Bowen uses these details to argue to show why Piers might have given his inheritance to Sir John, his sister’s son instead of following more regular inheritance patterns and willing it to his brother’s son (this is relevant as this disputed inheritance is the core of the feud between the three families). This level of detail and creative analysis is typical throughout the book.

Through showcasing the history of the feud between the Egertons, Morgans, and Mostyns, Bowens succeeds at supporting his thesis that duels could be deeply intertwined with feuds rather than replacing them. He also succeeds at showing his similar argument that litigation could go hand in hand with violence in such feuds. Outside the duel itself, Bowen highlights the violence, destruction, and intimidation wrought by the family’s armed men. The story of a group of armed Mostyn men waiting inside a church during a service to ambush Sir John doesn’t fit with a world that had abandoned private violence in favor of litigation. (41) While Bowen convincingly supports his thesis, he is careful to not exaggerate his claims. He argues that the story of the Morgan/Egerton duel did not necessarily represent a norm in England but rather a specific lived experience in a specific region. (16) Nevertheless every story is part of a greater whole, and Bowen’s book adds context and color to the history of violence and honor in early modern England and Wales.

Female Servants in Early Modern England is a social history written by Charmian Mansell, a lecturer on early modern England at the University of Sheffield. She received her PhD in 2016 from Exeter University, and Female Servants is her first book. 

The book argues that the experience of 16th and 17th century female servants has been narrowly understood in a variety of ways in the historiography. Mansell details a historiographical stereotype that it was mostly poor young women who became servants and that, in doing so, they left the wider economy to do purely domestic labor within the vulnerable confines of the patriarchal households of their social superiors.

Mansell challenges every aspect of this, arguing that women of a variety of ages and social classes became servants and that they often served their social equals as well as their “betters.” She challenges the idea that female servants did purely domestic labor and argues that rather than merely attending to families’ personal needs, female servants did labor in a variety of economic sectors and that they should be seen as “economic and social centres of their communities” (2) and “at the root of economic growth.”(2)

But Mansell doesn’t stop at resituating female servants within existing hierarchies. She argues that the framing that female servants existed within patriarchal households should be questioned. She does this for several stated reasons. First, Mansell argues that many households were not stereotypically patriarchal either because they were not headed by men or because men did not conform to didactic understandings of patriarchy. (10)

Additionally, Mansell argues that female servants did not exist purely within the households. Like those who surrounded them, they were members of society who moved through a variety of spaces. Mansell argues that the temptation to see female agency always through the lens of patriarchal authority can reify structures that, in practice, were more fluid. (10) Instead of searching “for the ways in which women ‘participated’ in social processes which are still defined in terms of male experience,” (15) Mansell seeks to understand “female experiences” on their own terms. She argues that by understanding both male and female experiences, a “human point-of-view” may be sought. (15)

Mansell focuses her book on rural female servants in the south and west of England. She notes that much research has been done on urban London populations of female servants, but as only a quarter of the English population was rural in the mid 17th century (16), she argues that a study of rural populations outside of London is merited. Rather than a broad study of rural servitude across all of England, Mansell focuses on five dioceses in the south and west of the country.

She takes a bottom-up approach in her book as befits her subject matter. She divides her book into three parts. In the first, she describes who female servants were and how they appear in her sources, in the second, she describes “patterns of labor,” and in the third, she describes
“[spatial], [social], and [temporal]” aspects of female servitude. (19) To make her arguments, she heavily relies on ecclesiastical court records with disputes that involved female servants. While she is cautious of the potential bias in how the cases may have been recorded, Mansell emphasizes that they are nevertheless representative of plausible occurrences, even if they did not all occur as stated. (13) She evaluates the cases extensively from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.

When examining the cases qualitatively, Mansell is a storyteller. She skillfully reads between the lines and conveys her anecdotes in a narrative form that at times blends genres. She finds stories and details in creative places. For example, chapter two relies heavily on analysis of signatures to infer details about literacy and, by proxy, class. At times her approach might be speculative, but when it is she acknowledges it.

In general, Mansell makes an effort to explain the decisions she makes throughout her work. These explanations are occasionally personal. For example, she explains that she “unapologetically” chose to conclude her book with the story of Issot Riches because “–for some intangible reason – [she] was drawn to her when [she] found her story. ”(297) I appreciated Mansell’s honest and open approach and felt it added personality to her book in addition to adding context and explanation.

While Mansell shines as a storyteller, she does not neglect quantitative approaches in her book. Her chapters are filled with tables recording gender percentages, age breakdowns, space classifications, master demographics, and a wealth of other details. What stood out to me was chapter 6, where Mansell calculated a variety of details about female servants’ work lives, including the busiest times of day, weekly schedule, and percentages of different categories of labor.

Mansell succeeds at her thesis while mostly avoiding overstating her point. For example, she pushes back at the idea that servitude existed mainly as a life cycle position for girls before marriage, while acknowledging that it “was predominantly an experience of youth” (120) She highlights the agency and centrality of female servants, but also notes the ways in which servitude could be less of an opportunity and more of a necessity “that was not empowering.” (120) While I wasn’t fully convinced by some of her arguments about the economy and the patriarchal nature of the household, she articulated herself with nuance. Mansel succeeds at both bringing individual stories to life and illuminating wider trends. Overall, the book shines as a multifaceted case study of how to do bottom-up history well.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200-1540 is a social history of medieval English peasantry written by Christopher Dyer, an emeritus professor of local history from the University of Leicester. The book stands out because of the breadth of topics it covers and the depth with which it explores them. Dyer focuses on a specific region in England, the West Midlands, and looks at it holistically using sources such as tax records, maps, and ridge and furrow analysis. From these sources, Dyer seeks no only to reveal the realities that peasants faced, but also the choices they made and the reasons why they may have made them. In the process, Dyer hopes to reveal the variety of ways in which peasants shaped the society they lived in, and to do so from their own perspective. (1)

 The first chapter after the introduction (chapter two) deals with the relationship between peasants and the landscape they inhabited and is a good example of the approach of the book. In it, Dyer highlights the various ways in which the landscape affected peasant lives. For instance, the fertility of the soil affected the degree to which peasants farmed rather than engage in industry or animal husbandry. But Dyer emphasizes that peasants were not passively affected by the land — they actively shaped it. For example, in areas subject to sea flooding, Dyer describes the complex systems of seawalls and ditches that peasants built to allow access to fertile meadows and arable land. (19)

 Dyer acknowledges, however, that peasants were not the only ones shaping the land. Lords frequently controlled the changing landscapes as they encouraged the clearing of forests to make fields and enclosed fields to pasture sheep. But peasants also made changes to the land of their own initiative and Dyer argues that lords often only recognized them after the fact. (24) Sometimes peasants even opposed the lords directly in order to preserve their preferred landscapes as when Dyer gives an example of peasants tearing down newly built fences and filling newly dug ditches. (22) Dyer is nuanced in his description of the actions of peasants and lords and emphasizes peasant agency without minimizing lordly power.

While Dyer gives frequent examples, one strength of his work is the degree to which he looks at patterns and specific details. In this chapter, some of the details he examines include cottage locations, numbers of households, land allocation, and number of assarts (land clearances). These details help to paint a picture not just of what was happening (e.g. expanding settlements into the forest) but also who specifically was involved, what they gained and risked, and how their actions related to their circumstances.

Dyer’s theme of peasant agency and his detailed approach continue in the subsequent chapters throughout this work. In chapter three he covers peasant landholding including leasing and subleasing approaches. He emphasizes the control that peasants had over who received their properties(both by official and unofficial channels). In chapter four, Dyer covers the agency of peasants to move, both geographically and socially as they migrated and advanced their social class. Chapter five covers the various ways that peasants organized their households. Chapter six emphasizes the agency of peasants in planning their crops and adopting or rejecting agricultural innovations. Chapter seven goes into detail about how peasants used each of the animals they kept. Here Dyer emphasizes the synergistic nature of animal husbandry and agriculture and shows how peasants, through raising animals, raised their standards of living. In Chapter eight, Dyer pushes back at the view that towns were the result of central planning by elites, and argues that they often organically grew from communities built by peasants. In chapter nine, Dyer complicates the distinction between preindustrial and industrial. He argues that peasants spent a great deal of time doing activities that could be described as industry.  Finally chapter ten examines the peasant worldview and compares it to the idealistic vision expressed in Piers Plowman of a society in which each class plays their role harmoniously. Dyer pushes back at this vision, but does so with nuance, emphasizing the ways in which peasants supported their secular and religious authorities, but also took initiative at the local level and were willing to stand up for their rights.

Dyer’s book is occasionally dry. This is a weakness that might have been improved at times by changes to the prose, although he generally does an excellent job. It is, at times, a difficult read because of the time he spends on details such as the percentages of peasants who owned halfyardlands and the measurements of farm animals. However, these details are also what makes the book so fascinating. Dyers goes beyond describing the generalities of peasant existence and instead describes a working model of their lives. Through the details he includes, the reader is able to visualize peasant society and to begin to understand it. One might question some of his conclusions about the peasant worldview. For example, I felt he overstated his point in his description of peasant families as cold units of order and discipline. (144) Nevertheless, even if one disagrees with aspects of Dyer’s analysis, the details he provides make an excellent base for alternative interpretation.

Dyer argues at the beginning of his book that he didn’t set out to write a book about peasants because they have been neglected by historians; he acknowledges that they haven’t.(1) Rather, Dyer seeks to showcase how peasants were impactful in history. Throughout his book, he shows how peasants transformed their landscape, built up villages and towns, and engaged in industry. Rather than viewing peasant actions through the lens of contestation with manorial power, Dyer describes a heterogenous class of people in which individuals had their own disparate concerns, disputes, ventures, and opportunities. He presents peasants, not as the servants of the lords, but as the body of the society itself. Rather than a class that was pushed aside to make way for modernity, Dyer argues that peasants played their part in its creation. (345)