Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England - Softcover

Cressy, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192825305 ISBN 13: 9780192825308

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2001

Synopsis

Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings-bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism-disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.

About this title

Review:

scholarly and entertaining history book (The Times, PLAY, March 31 2001)

Outstanding as a piece of histrical reconstruction ... Cressys impressive blend of documentary grasp, empathy and imagination throws a bright light upon the nature of the discipline of the established church, of dissent and the strength of the popular sense of community ... Cressy shows himself a master. (Professor Ivan Roots, Cromwelliana, 2000.)

Synopsis:

"What a world is this? It is marvelous, it is monstrous! I hear say there is a young woman, born in the town of Harborough, one Bowker, a butcher's daughter, which of late, God wot, is bought to bed of a cat, or have delivered a cat, or, if you will, is the mother of a cat! Oh God!" William Bullein - Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence (1578) David Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings-bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism-disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0192825305
• ISBN 13: 9780192825308
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368