The history of witchcraft and demonologySummers, Montague
History
The history of witchcraft and demonology
Summers, Montague
Demonology; Demonology -- History; Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- History
In the interlude to which Collier has assigned the name _Mankind_
Mischief summons to her aid the fiend Titivillus, who had appeared in
the _Judicium_ of the Towneley Mysteries. Once the Devil’s registrar and
tollsman, he is best known as “Master Lollard.” According to a silly old
superstition Titivillus was an imp whose business it was to pick up the
words any priest might drop and omit whilst saying Mass.
When we pass to the beginnings of the regular drama we find an extremely
interesting play that introduces, if not magic, at least fortune-telling,
John Lyly’s “Pleasant Conceited Comedie” _Mother Bombie_, acted by the
children of Paul’s and first printed in 1594. Although the plot is of
the utmost complexity and artificiality it does not seem to be derived,
as are most of Lyly’s stories, from any classical or pseudo-classical
source, whilst the cunning old woman of Rochester, who supplies the
title, has in fact little to say or do, except that her intervention
helps to bring about the unravelling of a perfect maze and criss-cross of
incidents. When Selena addresses the beldame with “They say, you are a
witch,” Mother Bombie quickly retorts “They lie, I am a cunning woman,” a
passage not without significance.
Upon a very different level from Lyly’s play stands Marlowe’s magnificent
drama _The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus_. The legend of a man who
sells his soul to the Devil for infinite knowledge and absolute power
seems to have crystallized about the sixth century, when the story of
_Theophilus_ was supposed to have been related in Greek by his pupil
Eutychianus. Of course, every warlock had bartered his soul to Satan, and
throughout the whole of the Middle Ages judicial records, the courts of
the Inquisition, to say nothing of popular knowledge, could have told of
a thousand such. But this particular legend seems to have captured the
imagination of both Western and Eastern Christendom; it is met with in
a variety of forms; it was introduced into the collections of Jacopo à
Voragine; it found its way into the minstrel repertory through Rutebeuf,
a French _trouvère_ of the thirteenth century; it reappeared in early
English narrative and in Low-German drama. Icelandic variants of the
story have been traced. It was made the subject of a poem by William
Forrest, priest and poet, in 1572; and it also formed the material for
two seventeenth-century Jesuit “comedies.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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