Posted: Apr 04, 2013 5:37 pm
iamthereforeithink wrote:With all due respect, jerome, what exactly are you expecting here? Somebody wrote a story in the 18th century, and now we are supposed to establish the causality of events that purportedly took place in the story, by scientific or logical means? Should we also try to explain the 3 witches Shakespeare wrote about in "Macbeth"? If we are going to take anecdotes seriously, then there are thousands, even hundreds of thousands out there, that are even more interesting, genuine-sounding and hard to disprove than the one you quoted.
Good question. I have a couple of books on Witchcraft in Shakespeare, well one on that and one on how Shakespeare uses occult and supernatural themes. I think this is as worthy of study as that, and I hope my subsequent post I was typing at the same time shows how we can begin to analyse and look at what we can learn from such a case. This one is rather peculiar, in that I think it may be one of those critical events that shapes English history, perhaps up there with the signing of the Magna Carta and Charles I raising his standard at Oxford in terms of shaping politically modern England, though why may take a while to become apparent, and i may be wrong. However I do think that perhaps EP Thompson and others could be right when they suggest without Epworth our nation might have looked very different: it all depends how much of an influence it had on the shaping of one young schoolboy's beliefs. And it is a very well documented case as I will show - one we can actually play with and explore in depth.
j x