Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War
The Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies presents Mark Stoyle, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Southampton for "Reflections on Prince Rupert's Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda during the English Civil War."
In the Social Sciences Building (SSB), Room 107, UC San Diego.
In this talk, Mark Stoyle explores the fantastic rumors which circulated around Charles I's famous nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and his dog, “Boy,” during the English Civil War of 1642-46, rumors which suggested that Rupert was an occult practitioner, while his canine companion -- far from being a genuine dog -- was in fact a beautiful woman who had transformed herself into the shape of an animal through magical art.
The paper demonstrates how these ideas were spread by both Roundhead and Cavalier polemicists and suggests that the story of Prince Rupert's "necromantic dog" should not be dismissed as an amusing, but essentially trivial, side-show.
Instead, the paper argues, the story of Boy has much wider ramifications, not only alerting us to the sheer skill and cunning with which both Parliamentarian and Royalist hacks strove to exploit occult motifs in support of their cause but also providing a new perspective on the ways in which popular and elite ideas about politics and the supernatural converged and interacted with each other during the troubled 1640s.
Mark Stoyle is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (1994), From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City' (1996), West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (2002), Circled with Stone: Exeter's City Walls 1485-1660 (UEP, 2003), Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005), and The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War (2011).
Info: [email protected].