Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession by Kirsten C. Uszkalo (review)

The study of bedeviling and its attendant literature offers a unique insight into the world of possession in early modern culture. As Kirsten C. Uszkalo writes in the opening chapter to this new book Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession, "As we read our own literature, fiction and nonfiction, as reflecting something of the human condition, in describing the demoniac's language, gestures, and torments, possession literatures provide insight into 'real' experiences that underpin early modern possessions" (1). Consequently, by interrogating what possession meant for Renaissance thinkers and writers, we gain insight into not only those deemed "bedeviled," but also, more profoundly, an understanding of their ostensibly clearheaded contemporaries.

The performance and recording of possessions, and the subsequent dissemination of "possession literature" was a minor, but nonetheless substantial field of early modern literary production. According to Uszkalo there were approximately 133 people recorded as being possessed between 1564 and 1699, out of a total of 621 "victims of witchcraft in early modern English texts counted so far" (3). Within this, the corpus varied dramatically in genre—some were ephemeral accounts, others depositions, while many of the most well known (such as that of Charity Philipot in 1681) were extended narratives, containing details such as current medical case histories. Uszkalo guides us through this body of work, attempting to synthesize recent findings in neuroscience with theoretical paradigms of sociocultural discourse and practice to help elucidate our understanding of what possession meant for the tumultuous age of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. "This project," the author writes, "couples close reading with the use of concepts from cognitive science and discoveries from neuroscience as interpretive tools useful to interrogate various stages of possession" (3). Always, however, Uszkalo is mindful of the very real human experience at the heart of the literature—"[t]he experience [of possession]," she correctly notes, "is embodied, not transcendent; it is a situated event" (7). Direct consideration of both theoretical and actual environments are at the forefront of the book. Analyzing the experiential accounts of figures such as the aforementioned Philipot, Mary Hall, and Joyce Dovey, Uszkalo attempts to interpret the discourses at play within the social dynamic between the possessed and the recorder.

Beginning appropriately with how possession was first diagnosed in a patient, Bewitched and Bedeviled shows how symptoms were deemed psychological as well as physiological—convulsions and glossolalia, rage, and ulcers were deemed as signifying preternatural influence. In addition to this broad scope of manifestation, causes were similarly multiple. While physiological theory made its interventions, the dominant debate of the period—which centered on these symptoms' religious meaning—held sway. "Reformation ideas of election and reprobation meant that no 'good works' one did on earth would change the state of one's soul in the afterlife," Uszkalo informs us, and thus, "damnation was a thread that tied the bewitched and bedeviled together" (7). Fear of inescapable hell understandably drove some—such as Joan Drake (who swallowed pins) and Hannah Allen (who entombed herself beneath the floorboards of her attic)—to seemingly possessed behaviors.

If Chapter 1 provides a survey of the types of possession recorded, Chapter 2 sketches out how they were interpreted and understood in their own time. Here Uszkalo touches upon the seminal ideas of early modern theoretical approaches developed by the likes of Helkiah Crooke, Thomas Adams, and John Downame. Furthermore, in keeping with her attempt to comprehend and diagnose the underlying causes of possessive behaviors, Uszkalo pays particular attention not only to contemporaneous medicinal textbooks such as Crooke's Microcosmographia (1616), but also late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century approaches to possession literature. Citing the important work of Diane Purkiss and Nathan Johnstone, Uszkalo shows how historians of medicine, sociology...