Bewitched and Bedeviled ― A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession

Narratives of early English demoniacs have survived in medical and philosophical treatises, salacious and cheap ephemera, and formulaic and culturally constructed depositions. Demon possessions have been read as power struggles and performances. Possession and bewitchment have been contextualized culturally and historically, as a part of the legal system, village economics, and developing science. This book offers a bold theoretical perspective on the body possessed. Cognitive science - especially the role of embodied cognition - has enjoyed great attention in recent years, through a number of different fields and applications. Using ideas derived from cognitive science, this study constructs a framework which moves through the stages of possession and exorcism to describe how the social, religious, and medical were internalized to create the vivid and vexed cognitive, physical, and cultural manifestations of demon possession in early modern England.

Kirsten C. Uszkalo is a specialist in seventeenth-century literature, early modern cultural studies, and women's writing and the author of a number of scholarly articles on witchcraft, possession, and digital culture. She is the lead editor of the Witches in Early Modern England Project and the editor of Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies in the Preternatural. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada.