Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe

Engaging with fiction and history-and reading both genres as texts permeated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions-this collection scrutinizes the historical intersection of early modern European superstitions and English stage literature. Contributors analyze the mechanisms that shape, preserve, and transmit beliefs; and they explore who and what, in the early modern period, determined orthodoxy and how perceptions came to be considered strange and thus superstitious. As such, the essays in this collection investigate where superstitions come from and how they are sustained and communicated within early modern European society. It has been proposed by scholars that once enacted onstage and thus brought into contact with the literary-dramatic perspective, belief systems that had been preserved and reinforced by historical-literary texts underwent a drastic change. By highlighting the connection between historical-literary and literary-dramatic culture, this volume tests and explores the theory that performance of superstitions opened the way to disbelief.