Possession, Puritanism and Print

This new monograph tells a compelling story of injustice and passionate resistance to religious persecution in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Through an analysis of a sensational series of demonic possessions and exorcisms, it highlights the existence of controversies in print in the late Elizabethan period of the kind that would one day lead to civil war. This book is the first full-length, analytical study of the pamphlet controversy surrounding John Darrell, a rebellious 'puritan', and his group of exorcists. The cultural implications of the case, based on the puritan (or 'godly') notion that devils could be expelled only by their favoured methods of prayer and fasting, were immense.