James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England

Casebooks in Early Modern England:

Casebooks are the richest sources that we have for encounters between early modern medical practitioners and their patients. This article compares astrological and medical records across two centuries, focused on England, and charts developments in the ways in which practitioners kept records and reflected on their practices. Astrologers had a long history of working from particular moments, st...

Bedeviling Spectacle: Law, Literature, and Early Modern Witchcraft

The physician and witchcraft in restoration England.

THE YEAR of 1660 witnessed important political and scientific developments in England. The restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England occurred with the return of Charles II after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the Puritan influence. The Royal Society, after informal meetings for nearly fifteen years, was established as a scientific organization in 1660 and received its Royal...

The Royal Touch in Early Modern England

With The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin, Stephen Brogan offers a new understanding of the royal touch – the ability of kings and queens to miraculously heal their subjects of particular diseases in 16th and especially 17th-century England. ‘Greater numbers of people were touched for scrofula during the Restoration by both Charles II and James II, and with greate...

The stillbirth rate in early modern England.

Over the last 40 years or so English parish registers have been extensively analysed to create a range of demographic measures relating to mortality, fertility and nuptiality. This process has enabled the major population changes to be revealed from 1538, the date when parish registers were first ordered to be kept, until 1837, when a national system of civil registration was introduced.1 In ad...