Read e-book online The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism PDF

By Mark Knights

ISBN-10: 0199577951

ISBN-13: 9780199577958

The satan in conceal illuminates the influence of the 2 British revolutions of the 17th century and the shifts in spiritual, political, clinical, literary, financial, social, and ethical tradition that they caused. It does so throughout the interesting tale of 1 family members and their locality: the Cowpers of Hertford. Their dramatic heritage incorporates a homicide secret, bigamy, a scandal novel, and a tyrannized spouse, prepared opposed to a backdrop of violently competing neighborhood factions, rampant non secular prejudice, and the final conviction of a witch in England. Spencer Cowper was once accused of murdering a Quaker, and his brother William had illegitimate teenagers by way of his moment 'wife'. Their scandalous lives grew to become the resource of public gossip, a lot to the horror in their mom, Sarah, who poured out her middle in a diary that still chronicles her feeling of being enslaved to her husband. Her sons remained within the limelight. either have been instrumental within the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell, a firebrand cleric who preached a sermon in regards to the illegitimacy of resistance and non secular toleration. His parliamentary trial in 1710 provoked severe riots in London. William Cowper additionally intervened in 1712 to safe the lifetime of Jane Wenham, whose trial provoked a wide-ranging debate approximately witchcraft ideals. The Cowpers and their city are a microcosm of a altering global. Their tale means that an early 'Enlightenment', faraway from being easily a stream of rules sparked via 'great thinkers', was once formed and complicated through neighborhood and private struggles.

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Dr Coatsworth added drama by relating how he had himself nearly been drowned. His experience of falling overboard one time, when he had swallowed ‘a great deal of water’, convinced him that the belly of any body that had been in the water several hours would be full of water: ‘every body that is drowned is suffocated by water passing down the Wind pipe into the Lungs’. ’ Several more doctors confirmed the notion that a body without water in it ‘was dead before it was put into the water’. But the most vivid evidence came from Edward Clement who was a mere sailor.

He and his friends had received payment from Cowper; and they had ghoulishly gone to view the body of their victim, returning if not to the scene of the crime then at least to where she lay. But if the evidence for the prosecution was sensational, the defence case proved even more so, pitting the medical experts against each other in what was one of the first trials in which forensic evidence played a major part. scientific reputations What trust do we place in experts, such as doctors or politicians?

But the most vivid evidence came from Edward Clement who was a mere sailor. In 1689, almost immediately after William III had been crowned king, England had declared war against France, a war that helped propel the nation to Great Power status. The early battles had been naval ones, with many casualties (over 1 million men were to die in the conflict before its resolution in 1713). Spencer’s trial took place in a lull between the fighting, for a temporary halt was called to the war in 1697, before it began again in 1702; but the memories of death were all too sharp for Clement.

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The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment by Mark Knights


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