Richard Raiswell

University of Prince Edward Island | UPEI · Department of History

From his first appearances in scripture preventing Balaam from disobeying God’s will to his supposed role presiding over cannibalistic orgies in the middle of the fifteenth century, the devil has been a dynamic force underlying European society. The personification of shifting fears and anxieties over the ages, he has served to critique and police...

Early modern demoniacs were diagnosed through a process of negotiation between patient and community. Possession knowledge, then, was locally generated, a function of the space in which it was produced. This paper turns to consider the related problem of how a contested possession—one where this dynamic seems to have broken down—was established for...

This chapter seeks to establish the broad boundaries that enclosed questions of evidence in early modern Europe, thereby laying the groundwork for the chapters that follow. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these boundaries were expansive, permitting the construction, interpretation, and assimilation of many kinds of evidence that later c...

Between 1616 and 1619, the English cleric Edward Terry served as chaplain to Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to the Court of the Great Mughal. During this period, Terry had an opportunity to observe both Muslim and Hindu society and customs firsthand. Upon his return to England, Terry wrote up an account of his observations and experiences, a wo...

This book explores the manifold ways of knowing—and knowing about— preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited and were believed to act in early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled...

The motto of the Royal Society—Nullius in verba—was intended to highlight the members’ rejection of received knowledge and the new place they afforded direct empirical evidence in their quest for genuine, useful knowledge about the world. But while many studies have raised questions about the construction, reception and authentication of knowledge,...

This article examines the distinctly Calvinist understanding of India underlying Edward Terry's 1655 Voyage to East-India. It argues that Calvinism provided Terry with a set of assumptions that helped translate the raw data of his own experiences in India into culturally useful geographical knowledge accessible to his non-travelling readers. For Ca...

The Mughal “Padshah”: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household. Jorge Flores, ed. and trans. Rulers and Elites 6. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 182 pp. $128. - Volume 70 Issue 3 - Richard Raiswell

This 15,500-word essay examines the place of one of the most popular geographical texts of the sixteenth century, Joannes Boemus’s 1537 Omnium gentium mores, in Renaissance geographical thought. The text is problematic, for, although it was printed dozens of times through the centuries and translated into all major European vernaculars, the geograp...

Early seventeenth-century ethnography was run through by a profound tension. On the one hand, Francis Bacon and the prophets of the new empiricism championed data derived from the testimony of the eye as the surest way of cleansing the mind of the false idols that had so deceived earlier generations in their consideration of the natural world. Yet...

This article examines the role of the Christian Bible in forging a distinctly medieval geographical consciousness. Though the sacred text had little explicit to say about basic issues of cosmography or even about the location of places beyond the bounds of the Holy Land, the fact that God's act of creation marked not just the beginning of time but...

En 1622, au printemps, l'adolescente Katheren Malpas, sa mère et ses grands-parents du côté maternel ont été inculpés dans le Star Chamber pour avoir cyniquement organisé une possession démoniaque frauduleuse afin de profiter de la charité de leurs voisins. En puisant dans le procés-verbal détaillé, le présent article reconstruit le mécanisme de l'...

Richard Raiswell, University of Prince Edward Island, rraiswell@upei.ca