Staging the occult: Continental European influences on the literature of the English Renaissance stage

My dissertation traces and exposes the impact tracts and treatises that were published between 1486 and 1634 in both England and continental Europe had on the literature of the English stage. The focus of this study lies with works that debate the belief in the occult, the persecution of witches, and the dangers of sorcery. Drawing from a wide variety of European demonological works, I lay bare intercultural connections and show how continental influences are fictionally transformed in the hands of English playwrights for the stages of early modern London. Interestingly, the vast majority of the authors who published pamphlets and treatises dealing with occult beliefs held offices either within the Roman Catholic or the reformed churches or worked within the judicial or executive branches of early modern society. At the very least, they were university students, more often than not connected with either staunchly Catholic or fiercely reformed centers of Renaissance learning. In an effort to prove connections between the largely non-fictional body of literary and intellectual culture they produce and the stage literature of the English Renaissance stage, I examine sample writings of this early modern intelligentsia, writings that at times educate but more often caution the masses against committing sins of faith. As such, the core of my dissertation is dedicated to an investigation into early modern systems of belief and to an analysis of the rhetoric of this fundamentally theological, philosophical, and, essentially, demonological debate. The questions I answer in this study inquire into the nature of this debate, within its contemporary sociologic and intellectual context as well as in its fictional reincarnation in early modern drama. Why did Renaissance thinkers feel so strongly about clearly superstitious matters? Who defines faith in this period of religious turmoil? And who is willing or unwilling to trust these self-proclaimed authorities? I argue that the fictional literature of the Renaissance is a sounding board for the various and often contradictory early modern demonological writings, and I prove that continental European interpretations and treatments of the supernatural had a considerable influence on the literature composed for the London theaters.