In recent years the supernatural has been a lively and revealing area for those who study early modern England. This excellent new collection of essays, Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England, edited by Marcus Harmes and Victoria Bladen, attempts to integrate aspects of occult belief—in magic, witchcraft, demon possession, and the realm of spirits—into the larger cultural context of the period. In doing so it offers a welcome reminder that the otherworldly was not an exotic adjunct to Tudor and Stuart society, but a central theme with important political effects.

The general acceptance of magic and the unseen world of spirits meant that the supernatural was threaded into the fabric of public life. In a chapter on the Elizabethan magician John Dee, Glyn Parry shows how alchemy and prophecy were explored in the Tudor court and used to support particular directions in foreign policy. The chapters by Pierre Kapitnick and Michael Devine, respectively, consider the powerful but ambiguous confluence of witchcraft beliefs and anti-Catholicism. The former describes the delicate politics that informed Reginald Scot's skeptical treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), in which Scot attacked witch persecutions as the product of popish superstition. In contrast, Devine points to the fears of a Catholic plot to bring down Elizabeth by magic that influenced anti-witchcraft legislation in 1563.

The intersection of secular and supernatural power is underscored by Marcus Harmes's essay on the exorcism controversy in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Harmes argues persuasively that the suppression of Catholic and Puritan exorcists was primarily an exercise in episcopal authority. In seeking to end the casting out of demons in England, Archbishop Richard Bancroft, aided by his combative chaplain (and follower of Scot), Samuel Harsnett, asserted the power of his office over the clergy, and his right to dictate policy on interactions with the spirit world.

Other essays in the collection offer close and culturally sensitive readings of early modern texts. Victoria Bladen considers the interplay between contemporary accounts of the trial for witchcraft of Elizabeth Sawyer and the play based on the event, The Witch of Edmonton (1621). Two chapters examine the continuing belief in ghosts during the Reformation, despite their supposed abolition by the Church of England. Fiona Martin observes how traditional ideas of the afterlife, and particularly the fate of suicides, inflected William Sampson's play The Vow Breaker (1636); and Catherine Stevens notes the residual power of traditional ghost narratives in Ludwig Lavater's skeptical treatise on apparitions, Of Ghostes and Spirites, which was published in an English translation in 1572. These texts were haunted by older ways of thinking that refused to disappear, and they quietly tested the assumptions that underpinned the Protestant cosmos.

In his essay on John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Martin Dawes considers the presentation of supernatural “wonders,” and contemporary ideas of how audiences should respond to them. He observes that “signs and wonders” were an occasion for enquiry and reasoned decision, rather than mere celestial fireworks. Dawes's carefully argued chapter shows that the supernatural could provide opportunities for rational discussion and debate, as well as tacit observations on the politics of the Restoration.

Perhaps the most arresting chapter is Charlotte-Rose Millar's reinterpretation of the sexual aspects of English witchcraft. Millar argues that English witches, in common with their continental counterparts, were often believed to have sex with the devil. She reviews the witchcraft pamphlets of seventeenth-century England, which include a surprising number of references, both explicit and implied, to the diabolical lovers of witches. The most startling of these also provides the cover of the book: an illustration from Nathaniel Crouch's The Kingdom of Darknes (1688), which contains a queasy depiction of demonic fellatio.

Millar's analysis involves some quite bold assumptions. Many of the instances of satanic sex that she presents implicate the creatures described in English witchcraft narratives as imps or familiar spirits. First, she suggests that these “bugs” can be classed as demons; and secondly, that the feeding of these creatures, often on “teats” concealed near the suspect's genitals, was a sexual act. Both points invite further discussion and may prove hard to sustain. Nonetheless, Millar should be congratulated for invigorating the subject through offering a new perspective on familiar material.

Millar's fascinating chapter illustrates, in miniature, how close attention to the supernatural can enrich and expand our understanding of early modern English culture. Taken as a whole, this book contributes significantly to this enterprise.