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  • The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment by Mark Knights
  • Ryan J. Stark
Mark Knights. The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment. New York: Oxford, 2011. Pp. xvii + 279. $55.

The Devil in Disguise is organized around three interrelated court trials that function as microcosms of a tumultuous English culture writ large, undergoing what Mr. Knights deems the “contested Enlightenment.” First is Spencer Cowper’s trial in 1699 for the murder of the beautiful young Quaker Sarah Stout. They had a failed romance, apparently, and Spencer—a married man—was less than forthcoming about his involvement. Sarah might have committed suicide, but her mother thought otherwise. Regardless, modern forensic standards of proof made conviction impossible, so the jury acquitted, in what Mr. Knights reads as an example of how the new empiricism continued to reshape cultural norms. Second is the 1710 trial of Henry Sacheverell, a handsome High Church priest who condemned occasional conformity and everything else that smacked of toleration. This caused the Cowpers and other powerful Whigs to push successfully for the cleric’s arrest, resulting in a hullabaloo emblematic of the period’s cutthroat politics: Sacheverell saw his opponents as demonically possessed, and Dissenters castigated Sacheverell’s numerous female fans for embracing too willingly [End Page 65] the doctrine of nonresistance. Finally, Mr. Knights revisits the 1712 Hertford trial of Jane Wenham, the last person in England convicted of witchcraft. The specific charge: “conversing familiarly with the Devil in the shape of a Cat.” William Cowper (aka “Will Bigamy” from Swift’s Examiner) interceded on her behalf, convincing Queen Anne to set aside the guilty verdict, which required the death penalty. Wenham lived the rest of her life in a small house on the Cowpers’ property. The status of demonology becomes the focus of the concluding chapter.

Mr. Knights is too good a scholar to tell the commonplace tale of how Enlightenment heroes such as Shaftesbury and Voltaire banished to the kingdom of dullness everyone who perceived Scripture to be divinely inspired, or saw the Holy Ghost as something more than a fairytale. Such triumphant stories of secularization are nonsense, of course, which brings us to the idea of the contested Enlightenment, an Enlightenment we have come to understand, more or less, with Mr. Knights’s vital caveat; namely, that many of the intellectuals at the time—the most discerning ones, perhaps—resisted several of its chief tenets, disapproving of reason’s apotheosis, the cult of objectivity, and the disenchantment of the world. This Enlightenment is seen as a series of arguments, many of which remain unresolved, rather than a glorious Zeitgeist that swept away the old order. Nonetheless, from Mr. Knights’s Enlightenment-friendly standpoint, the fanatics remain the fanatics; the mystics, superstitious; the French Prophets, quacks (he is probably right on this one); and Hell, an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.

Why not speak of English Enlightenments, plural, thus making room for the period’s piebald collection of Enlightenment narratives (Rosicrucian, Theosophical, and Libertine), complementing and at times contradicting each other? Mr. Knights acknowledges this possibility in the conclusion: “Historians now often talk of ‘enlightenments,’” but he pursues the concept no further, devoting his energy instead to the argument that England was better than France at revolutions. We are left, then, with The Enlightenment, contested, fractured, or otherwise.

As we rummage through the basement vaults and x-files of the long eighteenth century with Mr. Knights, we bump into fascinating bric-a-brac: a deck of cards carrying the theme of Sacheverell’s trial; a “Genealogie of Anti-Christ,” with Cromwell at the top and Muggletonians, Socinians, et cetera, playing their respective roles; the works of James Boevey, a neglected English deist and expert on Machiavelli; the quasi-pornographic frontispiece to Nathanial Crouch’s Kingdom of Darkness; Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709) in a different light, once we see how the Cowper rakes generated a model of Whig hypocrisy. We discover too that Francis Hutchinson almost certainly had a hand in writing The Case of the Hertfordshire Witchcraft Consider’d (1712), an anonymous tract vindicating Wenham. Hutchinson...

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