Module Information

This module complements and extends the study of the cultural, social, and historical contexts of Renaissance literature undertaken in the second-year core module Medieval and Renaissance Writing. It also complements a number of Level 2 and Level 3 modules, including Arthurian Literature, Shakespeare and Jonson, and Renaissance Women and Writing.

Literary texts of the English Renaissance betray the strong influence of magical and quasi-scientific discourses. This module looks at the rich and diverse relationship between Renaissance literary texts and the discourses of magic across a range of genres, including drama, poetry, masques, and prose. In two introductory seminars, the significance of magic in Renaissance society and culture are explored, and theological and political responses to magic and the figure of the magus are examined. In succeeding weeks, four broad categories of magical knowledge and practice - fairy lore, witchcraft, alchemy, and natural philosophy - are considered. Each seminar explores the ways in which these discourses function in the presentation of literary creativity, authorship, and narrative and generic structures in the specified text or texts. The presentation of magical discourses in these texts is interpreted within appropriate historical contexts, and students are encouraged to identify the ways in which magic functioned as a vehicle through which contemporary social, religious, and political issues could be examined and contested. In the final two seminars, concerning natural philosophy, the emergence of scientific discourse and the 'decline' of magic in the first half of the seventeenth century is considered and questioned.