Afterlives of Endor offers an analysis of the way early modern English literature addressed the period's anxieties about witchcraft and theatricality. What determined whether or not a demonologist imagined a trial as a spectacle? What underlying epistemological constraints governed such choices and what conceptions of witchcraft did these choices reveal? Pairing readings of demonological texts with canonical plays and poetry, Laura Levine examines such questions. Through analyses of manuals and pamphlets about the prosecution of witches—including Reginald Scot's skeptical The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), King James VI/I's Daemonologie (1597), and Jean Bodin's De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1580)—Afterlives of Endor examines the way literary texts such as Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Marlowe's Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus address anxieties about witchcraft, illusion, and theatricality. Afterlives of Endor attends to the rhetorical tactics, argumentative investments, and underlying tensions of demonological texts with the scrutiny ordinarily reserved for literary texts.

Laura Levine is Professor of Theatre Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She is the author of Men in Women's Clothing.

Consistently engaging and smart.

Joseph Campana, author of The Pain of Reformation:

Long before J. L. Austin insisted that words do things, post-Reformation writers worried about the power of words., Tthe power of Afterlives of Endor is its understanding of the terrifying paranoia about witchcraft as a form of performativity. Laura Levine offers new ways of understanding witchcraft's danger and fascination.

Julia R. Lupton, author of Shakespeare Dwelling:

This groundbreaking book discloses the anti-theatricality of demonological handbooks and the resurgence of theatricality within those manuals, despite their anti-theatrical prejudices.

Jessica Winston, author of Lawyers at Play:

Exceptional, lucidly argued, innovative, often brilliant explorations of witchcraft and theatricality.