Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Bewitched and Bedeviled offers a bold theoretical perspective on the body possessed. 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 and contextualized culturally and historically, as a part of the legal system, village economics, and developing science. Using ideas derived from cognitive science, Kirsten C. Uszkalo 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.