Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Mary Floyd-Wilson's groundbreaking study explores occult beliefs and their relation to women and scientific knowledge in six early modern plays.

Mary Floyd-Wilson (Author)

9781107036321, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 July 2013

250 pages, 3 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.51 kg

'[Floyd-Wilson's] clarity and simplicity of style and wealth of documentation increase her reader's pleasure. This book reminds us that the original, though now rare, meaning of occult is 'secret or hidden'. [The book] focuses on an area between God's Providence and the Devil's interference, where an animate, mysterious natural world challenged early modern men and women to discover its occult secrets.' Barbara H. Traister, Renaissance Quarterly

Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.

Introduction: secret sympathies
1. Women's secrets and the status of evidence in All's Well That Ends Well
2. Sympathetic contagion in Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women
3. 'As secret as maidenhead': magnetic wombs and the nature of attraction in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
4. Tragic antipathies in The Changeling
5. 'To think there's power in potions': experiment, sympathy, and the devil in The Duchess of Malfi
Coda.

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Theatre studies [AN]