Invisible Worlds

Death, Religion And The Supernatural In England, 1500-1700

How did traditional beliefs about the supernatural change as a result of the Reformation, and what were the intellectual and cultural consequences?

Following a masterly interpretative introduction, Peter Marshall traces the effects of the Reformers’ assaults on established beliefs about the afterlife. He shows how debates about purgatory and the nature of hellfire acted as unwitting agents of modernization. He then turns to popular beliefs about angels, ghosts and fairies, and considers how these were reimagined and reappropriated when cut from their medieval moorings.

Contents

PART 1: HEAVEN, HELL AND PURGATORY: HUMANS IN THE SPIRIT WORLD

1. After Purgatory: Death and Remembrance in the Reformation World
2. ‘The Map of God’s Word’: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’
3. Judgment and Repentance in Tudor Manchester: The Celestial Journey of Ellis Hall
4. The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms, c. 1560-1640
5. The Company of Heaven: Identity and Sociability in the English Protestant Afterlife

PART 2: ANGELS, GHOSTS AND FAIRIES: SPIRITS IN THE HUMAN WORLD
6. Angels Around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in the English Art of Dying
7. The Guardian Angel in Protestant England
8. Deceptive Appearances: Ghosts and Reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England
9. Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth
10. Transformations of the Ghost Story in Post-Reformation England
11. Ann Jeffries and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on Scepticism