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© The Historical Association 2000

© The Historical Association 2000. Published by
Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

The Doctrine of Transubstantiation and the
English Protestant Dispossession of Demons

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

Richmond, Virginia

Abstract
The early English Protestant practice of ‘dispossessing’ (exorcizing) demons ironically
depended on the intellectual acceptance of some of the principles underlying the Catholic
doctrine of transubstantiation. The Protestant practice of dispossession thus implied
an inchoate theology not as far removed from Catholicism as its advocates believed. As
Protestantism developed, gradually abandoning the principles common to both tran-
substantiation and dispossession, it also abandoned the practice of the latter.

I

n February 1564, English cleric John Lane expelled a demon from
eighteen-year-old Anne Mylner, who had been afflicted with convul-
sions, trances and hallucinations for over a month. In front of the

assembled citizens of Chester, Lane restrained the girl by force, squirted
vinegar into her nostrils, and led the onlookers in recitations of the Lord’s
prayer and the Te Deum. Several credible witnesses, including two knights,
attested to the demon’s eviction. The next day Lane preached a sermon
at a local church on the incident, and the following month saw the pub-
lication of The Copy of a Letter Describing the Wonderful Worke of God
in delivering a Mayden within the City of Chester, from an horrible kinde
of torment, which reported that the entire city was amazed at this miracle.
The event became the subject of several other books and inspired the
archdeacon of Chester to preach a sermon in the cathedral in front of
the mayor and the bishop of Chester.

1

Physical restraint, forced inhalation of a nauseating substance, repeti-

tions of rote prayers, aggressive publicity – this event bore all the marks
of the Jesuit exorcisms which would be the target of Protestant ire into
and throughout the following century. These very practices would later
be implicated in the Babington conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I and
to return England to Catholicism, would cause the deaths of several
Catholic priests, and would form the subject of countless chapbooks and

1

John Fisher, The Copy of a Letter Describing the Wonderful Worke of God in delivering a Mayden

within the City of Chester, from an horrible kinde of torment (1564).

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

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broadsides lampooning Catholic superstition and blasphemy. But John
Lane was not a Jesuit: he was a Cambridge-trained Puritan minister of
the gospel. This was not a Catholic exorcism, but an anti-Catholic exor-
cism, a Protestant ‘dispossession’, one of the first documented in England
but by no means the last, with dozens of published accounts of the same
dating all the way through the seventeenth century.

2

The practice of Prot-

estant dispossession was highly publicized and vigorously debated, attract-
ing celebrated practitioners and advocates (for example, martyrologist
John Foxe, nonconformist minister Arthur Hildersham and Quaker leader
George Fox), as well as celebrated critics (for example, Matthew Parker
and Richard Bancroft, archbishops of Canterbury, and William Cecil,
lord Burghley).

3

A few scholars, most notably D. P. Walker, have studied the political

implications of post-Reformation English Protestant dispossession,
but the theological foundation of the practice has remained largely un-
examined.

4

Of course, the practitioners and other advocates of Protest-

ant dispossession cited as their inspiration the example of Christ and his
disciples, who cast out demons so much more effectively than did their
Jewish rivals, but more than scriptural authority was required for the
practice to be credible. Ironically, the necessary theological foundation
existed in the doctrine of transubstantiation. While overtly repudiating
this doctrine as the most heinous of Catholic heresies, post-Reformation
English Protestant thinkers continued to embrace some of its subliminal
assumptions – assumptions essential to their belief in demonic possession
and dispossession.

I

The doctrine of transubstantiation, promulgated in 1215 by the Fourth
Lateran Council, stated that the bread and wine of the eucharist were
transformed at the moment of consecration in substance (but not in
appearance) into the literal body and blood of Christ, the change being
grasped by faith rather than by the senses.

5

Transubstantiation rendered

2

For instance, Thomas Jollie, The Surey Demoniack, or an Account of Satans Strange & Dreadful

Actings, In and About the Body of Richard Dugdale of Surey, Near Whalley in Lancashire (1697).

3

British Library Harleian Manuscript 590, fos. 6–63 (Foxe); Samuel Harsnet, The Discovery of

the Fraudulent Practices of John Darrel (1599) [hereafter Harsnet, Discovery], pp. 233, 269, 271
(Hildersham); George Fox, Book of Miracles, ed. Henry J. Cadbury (Cambridge, 1948), p. 122 (Fox);
Matthew Parker, Correspondence, ed. John Bruce and Thomas Perowne (Cambridge, 1853), p. 466
(Parker and Cecil); D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in
the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1981) [hereafter Walker, Unclean
Spirits], pp. 64–5 (Bancroft).

4

Walker, Unclean Spirits, p. 6; idem, ‘Demonic Possession Used as Propaganda in the Later 16th

Century’, Scienze Credenze Occulte Livelli di Cultura, ed. Leo S. Olschki (Florence, 1982), p. 242;
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971) [hereafter Thomas, Religion],
p. 53; T. G. Law, ‘Devil-hunting in Elizabethan England’, Nineteenth Century, ccv (1894) [hereafter
Law, ‘Devil-hunting’], 398.

5

Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997) [hereafter Muir, Ritual], p. 171.

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the eucharist a literal inversion of Christ’s incarnation. To consume Christ
was to embody him, to become him. Just as the sinless Christ had par-
taken of humanity during his sojourn on earth, sinful man momentarily
partook of divinity during communion. As Caroline Walker Bynum
has observed, to eat God during the eucharist was ‘a kind of audacious
deification, a becoming of the flesh that, in its agony, fed and saved the
world’. Saint Augustine and Saint Hilary had taught that ‘we are all
present in the sacrifice and Resurrection of the cross, that Christ, in dying,
digests and assimilates us, making us new flesh in his flesh.’ During com-
munion, one met Christ ‘at the moment of his descent into the elements
– a descent that paralleled and recapitulated the Incarnation’.

6

Even Satan

was forced to acknowledge this power of the God-man, as several
demoniacs attested. For instance, the demon who possessed the famous
French demoniac Martha Brossier in 1599 repeatedly caused the girl to
fall and convulse at the pronunciation of the Latin ‘And he was made
man: The word was made flesh: Therefore so great a Sacrament.’

7

The doctrine of transubstantiation, therefore, proved both God’s

humanity and man’s divinity, proved that the corporeal and the spiritual
were indissoluble, proved that God and man were one. Saint Andrew had
taught that Jesus gave man his immortality in exchange for man’s mor-
tality.

8

Just as Christ had assumed corporeality through his incarnation,

so would each man on the day of judgement again assume corporeality
to be resurrected in his own body. Christ’s incarnation demonstrated that
‘things Divine and heavenly are actually embodied in things earthly and
visible in such a sense that they are no longer two entities but one.’

9

So important was this principle that when Lollards and Anabaptists
attempted to dissociate Christ’s divinity from his humanity by espousing
the view that he possessed ‘a celestial Body which passed through that
of our Lady as “water through a pipe” [or] “. . . as sunshine through a
pane of glass” ’, they were accused of heresy.

10

The human body, though

rendered profane through Adam’s sin, also partook of the sacred through
Christ’s incarnation: the word was made flesh. And the flesh in question
was not simply that of an individual man, but that of the human com-
munity at large. As Eamon Duffy has pointed out, ‘The sacrifice of the
Mass was the act by which the world was renewed and the Church was
constituted, the Body on the corporas the emblem and the instrument
of all truly human embodiment, whether it was understood as individual

6

Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medi-

eval Women (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 3, 31, 53, 67.

7

Michel Marescot, A True Discourse Upon the Matter of Martha Brossier of Romorantin, Pretended

to be Possessed by a Devill, trans. Abraham Hartwell (1599), p. 6.

8

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (2 vols.,

1941) [hereafter Voragine, Golden Legend ], i. 12.

9

L. S. Thornton, quoted in Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England (2 vols., New Haven,

Conn., 1970) [hereafter Davies, Worship and Theology], i. 123, n172.

10

R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (New York, 1950), pp. 125–6.

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wholeness or as rightly ordered human community.’

11

Christ had assumed

the form of an individual man while on earth, but his true body was the
body of mankind.

But forever outside the community, exiled from the indissoluble one-

ness of God and man, estranged from the unity of divine and human,
lurked the adversary. Like Satan, man was created possessed of the gift
of free will, the gift that sealed his likeness to God, the ultimate will. Like
Satan, man abused this gift through rebellion, provoking God’s wrath
and earning his fall from grace. But, unlike Satan, man had a redeemer.
Christ’s sacrifice was for man, not for Satan. As the favoured recipient
of God’s mercy, man earned Satan’s wrath just as surely as did God. And
any man not possessed of the holy spirit was necessarily possessed of
Satan; moral neutrality was impossible. God’s creation was structured by
oppositions: dark and light, health and sickness, birth and death. As
Stuart Clark has observed, ‘Contrariety was thus a universal principle
of intelligibility as well as a statement about how the world was actually
constituted.’

12

This principle was implicit in nonconformist George

Gifford’s denial of the possibility of a vacuum: ‘God hath so ordained
that in this whole world there cannot be [a] vacuum, that is to say, any
place void or empty, but it must needs be filled with somewhat; there is
no power in man to make such empty place, so much as a pin’s head.’

13

Like the universe itself, man the microcosm was a plenum – either good
or evil, never impartial.

Satan manifested his hatred of both God and man in a diabolical

mimicry of God’s institutions and commandments, his parody of all
that was holy. Tertullian’s scornful epithet for Satan, simia dei, ‘God’s
ape’, was a favourite of James I, who used the phrase repeatedly in com-
menting on Satan’s parroting of God: ‘That is the difference betwixt
God’s miracles and the Devil’s; God is a creator, what he makes appear
in miracle, it is so in effect . . . whereas the Devil (as God’s ape)
counterfeit[s].’

14

Nonconformist Richard Bernard agreed, saying ‘Satan

endevoureth to bee an imitator of God, not to please him, but rather to
crosse him.’ Bernard expanded on this idea by setting out a table listing
twenty ways in which Satan imitated God. For instance, whereas ‘The
Lord hath his set Assemblies for his servants to meet together’, just so
does ‘the Divell hath his set meetings for his Magicians and Witches to
come together’.

15

Similarly, physician Johann Weyer articulated many

11

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New

Haven, Conn., 1992) [hereafter Duffy, Stripping the Altars], pp. 91–2.

12

Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present, 87 (1980),

110.

13

George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles (1587) [hereafter Gifford, Discourse],

sig. D4r.

14

King James the Sixth, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597) [hereafter King James, Daemonologie],

p. 23; for Tertullian, see Albert Reville, ‘History of the Devil’, Exorcism through the Ages, ed. St Elmo
Nauman (New York, 1974) [hereafter Nauman, Exorcism], p. 229.

15

Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-jury Men (1630), pp. 258, 260–5.

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ways in which Satan pretended to have God’s creative power by seeming
to restore the dead, cure the sick, embed solid objects in a human body,
enter human bodies or depart from them at will. In discussing the ejection
of objects such as rocks and pins from the mouth (a common sign of
demonic possession), Weyer argued that the phenomenon was an illusion
created by Satan, who caused the items to materialize in the mouth just
before ejection.

16

Despite his attempts to imitate God, therefore, Satan

proved himself unable even to implant a pin inside man, much less imbue
him with the breath of life. To Saint Anthony, Satan admitted that he
was powerless because ‘the Kingdom of Christ has spread out over the
whole earth.’

17

Satan’s essential powerlessness was symbolized by his invisibility.

Unlike man, made in God’s image, and unlike Christ, incarnated in man’s
image, Satan was widely believed to be, although corporeal, formless. As
Gifford explained, ‘A spirit hath a substance, but yet such as is invisible,
whereupon it must needs be granted that devils in their own nature have
no bodily shape nor visible form . . . [W]henever [devils] appear in a vis-
ible form, it is no more but an apparition and counterfeit show of a
body.’

18

Nonconformist John Webster agreed, explaining that only the

uncreated (i.e. God) could be pure spirit.

19

Congregational clergyman

Cotton Mather also asserted that any apparent form exhibited by Satan
was necessarily artificial: ‘[E]very Spirit is endued with an Innate Power
by which it can attract suitable matter out of all Things for a Covering
or Body, of a proportionable Form and Nature to itself.’

20

At a pinch,

even a cadaver would do: Satan sometimes animated a corpse of the
appropriate sex in order to copulate with a living man or woman.

21

The presumption of demonic corporeality followed logically from the

old idea that Satan’s ingress into and egress from the human body was
accomplished through bodily orifices, such as nostrils, ears, skin pores
or wounds.

22

And as Satan entered, so he exited: a would-be exorcist had

to be prepared to ‘force absolute garlands of demons to stream out the
natural openings of the body in single file’.

23

Satan frequently targeted

the mouth, as when he implored Helen Fairfax ‘to open her mouth and
let him come into her body’ or when he tried to repossess William Somers

16

Johann Weyer, ‘On the Wiles of Devils’, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, ed. George

Mora, trans. John Shea (New York, 1991) [hereafter Weyer, ‘On the Wiles’], pp. 87–8, 286–7.

17

Voragine, Golden Legend, i. 101.

18

Gifford, Discourse, sig. E1r.

19

John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) [hereafter Webster, Displaying],

p. 202.

20

Cotton Mather, quoted in Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases 1648–1706, ed. George Lincoln Burr

(New York, 1914) [hereafter Burr, Narratives], p. 281.

21

Lodovico Maria Sinistrari, Demoniality, trans. Montague Summers (New York, 1989) [hereafter

Sinistrari, Demoniality], p. 11.

22

Ibid., pp. 45–6; John Brinley, A Discovery of the Impostures of Witches and Astrologers (1680),

p. 55.

23

Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, trans. J. Courtenay Locke (New York, 1971)

[hereafter Givry, Witchcraft], p. 157.

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by entering his mouth as a rat.

24

Demoniacs often became possessed by

consuming unblessed lettuce, apples or bread on which an invisible
demon happened to be lurking at the moment of ingestion.

25

The mouth

also afforded the demon the perfect opportunity to enter a body through
a kiss.

26

The vulnerability of the mouth to demonic violation was mirrored by

the vulnerability of the nether mouth. Tales of possession and exorcism
through the anus were extremely common, as that of Saint Martin of
Tours, who exorcised a demoniac by thrusting his fingers into the man’s
throat, forcing the demon to exit from the anus, leaving ‘sad and foul
traces behind’.

27

The scatological potential of this situation lent itself

easily to attacks on heretics: political philosopher Jean Bodin reported
that in 1554 some Jewish Roman demoniacs were possessed by devils that
spoke ‘through the shameful parts’.

28

Similarly, Protestants were fond of

relating the story of how ‘a famous [Catholic] expeller of devils, having
cast out an evil spirit from a man in a monastery at Cologne, and being
politely asked by the Devil for some place of retiral, jokingly told him to
go to the privy. The ejected one having established him in that place
of resort, was enabled at the first visit of the facetious brother to most
effectively attack him during the temporary absence of his rear guard.’

29

To dislodge a demon so ensconced, the quickest means of relief was to
break wind. The best-known exponent of this form of self-help was
Martin Luther, whose repulse of Satan in this manner was frequently
retold by both admiring friends and disgusted enemies.

30

Whether scurrilous or amusing, accounts of demonic possession by

means of bodily orifices presumed that Satan, because he required door-
ways into the body, was corporeal. True, his body was much more tenu-
ous than man’s, accounting for his great swiftness and his ability to pass
through tiny portals, but he was none the less material.

31

His substance

was often described in terms of the four Aristotelian elements of air, water,

24

Edward Fairfax, Daemonologia: A Discourse on Witchcraft, ed. William Grainge (Harrogate, 1882),

p. 41; Harsnet, Discovery, p. 129.

25

Givry, Witchcraft, p. 156; Stephen Bradwell, ‘Mary Glovers Late Woeful Case, Together With

Her Deliverance’, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London, ed. Michael MacDonald (1991),
pp. 57–8; John Darrel, ‘A True Narration of the Strange and Grevous Vexation by the Devil of Seven
Persons in Lancashire and William Somers of Nottingham’, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable
Tracts on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects, ed. Walter Scott (13 vols., 1810) [hereafter
Scott, Somers Tracts], iii. 180.

26

Harsnet, Discovery, p. 37.

27

Roger Baker, Binding the Devil: Exorcism Past and Present (1974), p. 63.

28

Jean Bodin, On the Demon-mania of Witches, trans. Randy A. Scott (Toronto, 1995), p. 109.

29

C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933) [hereafter Ewen, Witchcraft], p. 109;

see also Francisco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York, 1988),
p. 192.

30

R. E. L. Masters, Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft (New York, 1962),

pp. 111, 282; Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (New York, 1996), pp. 158–9.

31

James Mason, The Anatomie of Sorcerie Wherein the Wicked Impietie of Charmers, Inchanters,

and Such Like, is Discovered and Confuted (1612) [hereafter Mason, Anatomie], p. 20; Edward Nyndge,
A True and Fearfull Vexation of One Alexander Nyndge (1615), sigs. A2v–A3r.

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fire and earth, like all the rest of creation.

32

Platonist Henry More’s theory

was that the bodies of devils were composed of snow and ice; being
naturally cold, therefore, the devils sought warm human bodies to
inhabit.

33

Satan’s shrouded corporeality was similarly implied when the

demon possessing William Somers was described as ‘palpable to some,
but visible to none’. Bystanders heard this demon knock on the bedstead,
so presumably it had a tangible hand or foot with which to knock.

34

Onlookers at other dispossessions were reported to strike out with their
hands or with swords in attempts to wound or drive off the demons as
they exited the bodies of the demoniacs, thus demonstrating the implicit
belief that the demons were corporeal.

35

Satan’s ability to possess a human body was a function of both his

invisible corporeality and his mimetic malevolence. Such possession was
one of Satan’s most terrible imitations of God: his parody of Christ’s
incarnation. As Christ had become man, so did Satan. But Luther had
said ‘there is one thing the Devil cannot do: he cannot become really
present flesh.’

36

Since Satan lacked God’s creative power or man’s gen-

erative power, he could not beget the human form he needed for his
parody, so he simply stole it. Theologian Pierre de Berulle articulated this
point, observing that Satan’s attempt to mimic the incarnation in this
manner explained ‘the great increase in possession since the birth of
Christ’.

37

Alluding to this idea, demoniac Mercy Short baited her pos-

sessing demon with the taunt ‘When You have become a Man, and have
suffered a cruel Death on a Cross for me . . . Then come to mee again.’

38

For the devil to enter a human body, to possess it in a horrifying parody

of Christ’s incarnation, posed a threat not only to that single body but
also to the community to which that body belonged. Demonic posses-
sion was characterized by ‘the horror of the collapse of the categories
that define a human being’.

39

Mankind was considered dangerously close

to the animal state, with the boundary between man and beast so unstable
that the production of hybrid offspring between them was a commonly
reported occurrence. The socially impotent – children, adolescents, women
and servants – were considered especially brutish, often described in terms

32

Samuel Harsnet, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) [hereafter Harsnet, Declara-

tion], p. 58; Sinistrari, Demoniality, pp. 56–9; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and
trans. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York, 1927) [hereafter Burton, Anatomy], pp. 166 –
71; Charles Webster, ‘Paracelsus and Demons: Science as a Synthesis of Popular Belief’, Scienze
Credenze Occulte Livelli di Cultura, ed. Leo S. Olschki (Florence, 1982), p. 15.

33

St Elmo Nauman, ‘Exorcism and Satanism in Medieval Germany’, in Nauman, Exorcism, p. 83.

34

Harsnet, Discovery, pp. 239, 241.

35

Burr, Narratives, pp. 279, 331.

36

Martin Luther, quoted in Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New York,

1989), p. 240.

37

Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland (3 vols.,

New York, 1957), iii. 1062–3; see also Walker, Unclean Spirits, p. 41.

38

Cotton Mather, quoted in Burr, Narratives, p. 268.

39

Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981)

[hereafter Brown, Cult of the Saints], p. 112.

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

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comparing them with beasts, emphasizing their lack of education and
religion, denigrating their uncontrolled sexual behaviour. The demonstrable
spiritual inferiority of these people rendered them particularly suscept-
ible to diabolical temptation, thus lending credence to the widespread
perception that they were more commonly possessed by demons than
were their social superiors.

40

Many behaviours commonly exhibited during

possession were overtly bestial: barking, crawling on all fours, bellowing,
biting and so on. During his possession, William Somers apparently
attempted to mount a bitch.

41

In the eyes of the community, this meta-

phorical dehumanization of one of its members jeopardized the security
and identity of the entire community and, even more importantly, its unity
with God.

When the community was thus threatened with division from God,

its reunion with Him had to occur through the ouster of Satan. As Peter
Brown says, dispossession was ‘a drama of reintegration. The human
being who had been swept far away from the human community was
solemnly reinstated among the warm mass of his fellows.’ The drama
ended ‘after the demon had been investigated, judged and excluded, with
the recuperation of the full human personality’.

42

True, a successful dis-

possession demonstrated the sanctity of the acting minister, confounded
heretics, convinced sceptics and manifested God’s glory.

43

But its most

important function was similar to that of the eucharist: to incorporate
the individual within the godly community, to reunite man with God, to
merge flesh with spirit, to integrate word with deed. A successful dis-
possession was proof of faith – the demoniac’s, the minister’s, the com-
munity’s – and therefore an indication of the potential for grace. The
eviction of the demon accomplished not just the salvation of a single soul;
it expanded God’s kingdom while diminishing Satan’s. Thus one disposses-
sion became a model and a sign of universal salvation.

44

II

We see, then, that the assumptions of transubstantiation formed a theo-
logical substratum for the assumptions of Protestant dispossession. But
the concept of the eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice seemed heretical
to Luther and many other reformers.

45

It was not a repetition of Christ’s

sacrifice, merely a commemoration. True, a few of the early reformers, such
as Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester under Henry VIII, defended

40

Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Oxford,

1983), pp. 43–4, 134–5.

41

Darrell, ‘True Narration’, in Scott, Somers Tracts, iii. 193.

42

Brown, Cult of the Saints, p. 112.

43

Valerio Polidoro, quoted in Walker, Unclean Spirits, p. 7.

44

Susan R. Garrett, The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke’s Writings

(Minneapolis, 1989), p. 45.

45

Peter Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay on Historical Development

(1965) [hereafter Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine], p. 9, n3.

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transubstantiation because they thought that to reject it would be to deny
God’s omnipotence and to refuse the church’s traditional comfort to the
faithful, ‘to remove the only justification for having a temple’. But most
reformers eventually subscribed to the position of John Hooper, bishop
of Gloucester and Worcester under Edward VI, for whom transubstan-
tiation was ‘the rankest idolatry . . . a bastard . . . [and a] wicked woman’.
Its rejection was an essential first step in ‘the cleansing of the temple’.

46

But agreement on the first step was more easily achieved than agree-

ment on the second: what should replace the discarded doctrine? New
eucharistic interpretations competed for dominance, with Luther’s
consubstantiation, Zwingli’s virtualism and Calvin’s memorialism all
positing new metaphorical interpretations of the eucharist.

47

The uncer-

tainty of thoughtful men on this issue was demonstrated in the changing
opinions of Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of Canter-
bury. At the 1536 convocation, Cranmer detached himself from Henry
VIII’s position on the number of sacraments by sponsoring the argument
that only baptism and communion had scriptural authority as well as
invisible grace, but he still accepted transubstantiation. Twelve years later,
during the Lords’ debate on the sacrament in December 1548, he cited
patristic authorities to support his new position that ‘Christ when he
byddes us eate his bodye it is figurative; for we cannot eate his body
indeade.’ The phrase ‘Christ’s body’ is a metaphor for the church and its
members: ‘forasmuch as that mystery of eating Christ’s flesh and drink-
ing his blood extendeth further than the supper, and continueth so long
as we be lively [i.e. faithful] members of Christ’s body’. For Cranmer,
Christ’s crucifixion was ‘his one oblation, once offered’, and his sacrifice,
once offered, was ‘sufficient for evermore’. The emphasis on a metaphori-
cal rather than a literal interpretation of the phrase is clearly implied in
Cranmer’s language for the words of administration in the 1552 prayer
book: ‘Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and
feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.’

48

As alternative eucharistic interpretations developed, transubstantiation

lost considerable intellectual ground, frequently being attacked as con-
trary to scripture. Both Cranmer and Calvin pointed out that Christ’s
body could not literally be present in any bread and wine in any church
on earth because that body was locally circumscribed in heaven, where
the son sat at the right hand of the father, and would do so until the day of
judgment.

49

Thomas Becon, Cranmer’s chaplain, saw transubstantiation

as an incitement to idolatry in that, as the host was elevated during the

46

Davies, Worship and Theology, i. 78–9.

47

Ibid., p. 81; Muir, Ritual, pp. 174–5; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in

Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge, 1986), p. 54; William J. Bouwsma,
John Calvin: A Sixteenth-century Portrait (New York, 1988), p. 123.

48

Thomas Cranmer, quoted in Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine, pp. 21–2, 50, 73, 81; see also

Duffy, Stripping the Altars, p. 567; G. W. Bromily, Baptism and the Anglican Reformers (1953),
pp. 3–4.

49

Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine, pp. 67–8, 98.

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

455

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50

Davies, Worship and Theology, i. 103.

51

Ibid., p. 105.

52

Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine, p. 68.

53

Ibid., p. 51, n5.

54

Webster, Displaying, p. 224.

55

Thomas Cranmer, quoted in Davies, Worship and Theology, i. 113.

56

Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Montague Summers (New York, 1972) [hereafter

Scot, Discoverie], pp. 53, 57.

57

Harsnet, Declaration, p. 163; see also Law, ‘Devil-hunting’, 406.

sacring ritual, it became mere ‘gazing stock’ for the hungry-eyed masses.

50

For Nicholas Ridley, bishop of Rochester under Henry VIII, transubstan-
tiation violated the nature of the sacrament by denying both its function
as a sign and Christ’s humanity.

51

Calvin deemed heretical the idea that

Christ’s body was ‘so abased as to be enclosed under any corruptible
elements’.

52

In a more philological attack, humanist John Oecolampadius

pointed out that Christ’s language, Aramaic, contained no copulative verb
that could be properly translated by the English ‘is’; therefore, ‘This is my
body’ was more accurately rendered ‘This signifies my body.’

53

Increas-

ingly common became the argument that no one except God, certainly
not Satan, could ‘create . . . annihilate or transubstantiate any Creature
or substance’.

54

Transubstantiation was also attacked on non-scriptural grounds as

unnatural and illogical. Cranmer’s objections derived not only from his
conviction that transubstantiation was unsupported by scripture and
patristic doctrine, but also from his conviction that it was a violation of
nature, reason and sense: ‘it is against the nature of accidents to be in
nothing. For the definition of accidents is to be in some substance,
so that if they be, they must needs be in something. And if they be in
nothing, then they be not.’

55

Sceptic Reginald Scot similarly condemned

transubstantiation as ‘impossible, incredible . . . [and] unnaturall’. Every-
thing, said Scot, has its proper shape, substance and nature:

And therefore it is absolutelie against the ordinance of God (who hath
made me a man) that I should flie like a bird, or swim like a fish, or creepe
like a worme, or become an asse in shape: insomuch as if God would give
me leave, I cannot doo it; for it were contrarie to his owne order and decree,
and to the constitution of anie bodie which he hath made.

56

Upon hearing that some possessing demons had been forced by Jesuit

exorcists to testify that the host was ‘the very body of Christ’ and would
bleed if cut, archbishop of York Samuel Harsnet laconically countered
that it never seemed to bleed when broken for sacramental administra-
tion.

57

And in an unexpected inversion, the Westminster Confession of

Faith of 1647 subordinated the scriptural objection to transubstantiation
to a rational objection:

That doctrine which maintains a change of the substance of bread and wine
into the substance of Christ’s body and blood (commonly called transub-
stantiation) by consecration of a priest or by any other way, is repugnant

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not to Scripture alone, but even to common sense and reason, overthroweth
the nature of a sacrament and hath been, and is, the cause of manifold
superstitions, yea, of gross idolatries.

58

Weighing in against transubstantiation, along with the arguments from

faith and reason, was the argument from squeamishness. To cannibalize
God was repulsive to Cranmer, who came to repudiate the idea that
Christians were obliged by faith to ‘eat Christ with our teeth, grossly and
carnally’, to ‘chaw in pieces’, swallow, digest and excrete the body of
Jesus.

59

Scot, with his usual graphic bluntness, expanded on this idea:

The incivilitie and cruell sacrifices of popish preests do yet exceed both the
Jew and the Gentile: for these take upon them to sacrifice Christ himselfe.
And to make their tyrannie the more apparent, they are not contented to
have killed him once, but dailie and hourelie torment him with new deaths;
yea they are not ashamed to sweare, that with their carnall hands they teare
his humane substance, breaking it into small gobbets; and with their
external teeth chew his flesh and bones, contrarie to divine or humane
nature; and contrarie to the prophesie, which saith; There shall not a bone
of him be broken. Finallie, in the end of their sacrifice (as they say) they
eate him up rawe, and swallow down into their guts everie member and
parcell of him: and last of all, that they conveie him into the place where
they bestowe the residue of all that which they have devoured that daie.

60

Also contributing to the discrediting of transubstantiation was the drift

away from the literal interpretation of scripture in general. Nonconformist
minister Lewis Hughes exemplified this tendency in his metaphorical
definitions of terms from Revelation:

By heaven is meant, not the highest heaven, but the Church of Christ
militant here on earth . . . By Michael and his angels are meant, Christ and
his true followers, especially, the faithfull Preachers of the Gospel . . . By
the Dragon and his angels, are meant, the Devill, and the Heathen perse-
cuting Emperours, and the Popes . . . By the battell is meant persecutions,
raised by the Heathen persecuting Emperours, and the Popes, and Popish
Princes, against the Christian Religion, and the professors thereof.

61

Church of England ministers John Deacon and John Walker asserted

a similar position:

[T]hose scriptures which attribute to God, and spirites, a corporall forme,
as eies, eares, hands, feete, bodies, wings & such like; may (at no hand) be
expounded literally; but must rather be metaphorically, and spiritually
understood of us. So that, (by any those corporall formes) we may not
grossely conceive in God, or in spirites, such corporall members, appertaining

58

Westminster Confession of Faith, quoted in Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald

Bray (Minneapolis, 1994), p. 509.

59

Thomas Cranmer, quoted in Davies, Worship and Theology, i. 114; see also Brooks, Thomas

Cranmer’s Doctrine, p. 96.

60

Scot, Discoverie, p. 109.

61

Lewis Hughes, Certain Grievances, or the Popish Errors and Ungodliness of the Service-book, Plainly

Laid Open (1642), pp. 32–3.

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

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especially to their essentiall being: but, we must spiritually understand
thereby, those their supernatural vertues, operations and actions, which
(by such corporall formes) are metaphorically commended to our humane
capacities.

62

Webster also subscribed to the metaphorical reading of scripture on

this point: Satan had not literally entered Judas’s body but had simply
put an evil thought ‘into Judas heart to betray his Master’. Furthermore,
the legion of devils reported by Luke and Mark to have possessed the
Gadarene swine did not physically enter the bodies of the swine but simply

did go amongst, or into the herd of Swine, and put them into such a fright
or fury, by an effective power working upon them, that they ran down a
steep place into the Sea, and perished in the waters; but not that they did
personally and essentially enter into the bodies of the Swine, for that were
absurd and needless, for the Swineherd can with his Horn and Whip drive
them without creeping into their bellies, and much more might the Devils
drive them into the Sea . . . without a personal and local being in their
bellies.

63

Cranmer had begun the dismantling of transubstantiation with a fair

amount of intellectual deference:

in the sacrament or true ministration thereof be two parts, the earthly and
the heavenly: the earthly is the bread and wine, the other is Christ himself:
the earthly is without us, the heavenly is within us: the earthly is eaten with
our mouths, and carnally feedeth our bodies; the heavenly is eaten with
our inward man, and spiritually feedeth the same: the earthly feedeth us
but for a time, the heavenly feedeth us for ever.

64

By the next century, however, transubstantiation was being discussed
irreverently and sceptically by common men in taverns: ‘Eat of Christ,
therefore, the tree of life, at supper, and drink his blood, and make you
merry.’ Holy communion, said Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, was no
more than man’s daily eating and drinking ‘in love and sweet communion
with one another’.

65

Satirizing the Jesuit propaganda stories attesting to

the truth of the real presence, Church of England preacher (and lapsed
Catholic) John Gee related the following:

A Gentle-woman of England, in one of the yeeres of Iubile, travelled to
Rome: where beeing arrived, shee repaired to Father Parsons, who was her
confessor: and he administring unto her the blessed Sacrament (which, in
the forme of a little Wafer, hee put into her mouth) observed she was long
chewing, and could not swallow the same: whereupon he asked her, whether
she knew what it was shee received? Shee answered, Yes, a Wafer. At which

62

John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels (1601) [hereafter Deacon

and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses], p. 17.

63

Webster, Displaying, p. 240.

64

Thomas Cranmer, quoted in Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine, p. 101.

65

John Eachard and Gerrard Winstanley, quoted in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside

Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972), pp. 159–60.

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answer of hers, Father Parsons beeing much offended, he thrust his finger
into her mouth, and thence drew out a piece of red flesh, which after was
nailed up against a post in a Vespery or private Chappell within our Lady
Church: and though this were done about some twenty yeeres since or
more, yet doth that piece of flesh there remain to be seene, very fresh and
red as ever it was.

Gee roundly denounced this tale as a ‘knocking and long-lasting lie’. He
observed that ‘postifying’ this piece of flesh constituted a recrucifixion
of Christ that not even a Jew could surpass for ‘despight to the Lord’:

Verily, this Cobbler [Jesuit author John Markes] forgot his Lingell: For hee
should, like a workman of the Gentlecraft, have clapt on one patch more,
and added, that this newe-found gobbet of metamorphosed flesh, was kept
up in a shrine of gold, or lockt up in some box of Cristall. But what a
Post-head was hee, that would set it upon a post, to indure all weathers?
For which contempt (me Iudice) hee deserves to bee had into the Inquisition,
or to have his eares entayled to a perpetuity of possessing that naile and
post.

66

No longer did critics of transubstantiation use the courteous language
of the academy; by Gee’s time, they used raillery and ridicule.

Persistently attacked on scriptural, intellectual and emotional grounds,

transubstantiation eventually lost so much status that it became the Prot-
estant epitome of superstition, the nonsensical touchstone against which
all other intellectual error could be gauged. No longer was it necessary
to argue against it; one could simply beg the question of its fallacious-
ness. And as the general idea of the transmutation of matter fell out of
intellectual favour, so did the specific idea of transubstantiation. In fact,
nonconformist William Perkins and Scot both used the word transubstan-
tiation to mean transmutation, reducing the concept from the divine to
the mundane.

67

James I, having asserted that transubstantiation was ‘con-

trary to the natural quality of a body’, went on to say that the idea that
Satan could transform witches into mice or other small creatures was ‘so
like to the little transubstantiate god in the Papists’ Mass, that I can never
believe it’.

68

In other words, transmutation was unbelievable because it

was like transubstantiation, not vice versa. Similarly, Francis Hutchinson,
bishop of Down and Connor, asserted that vulgar superstitions ‘confound
the Laws of Nature, and destroy the Testimony of our Senses, in some
Cases, as much as Transubstantiation’.

69

If transubstantiation was no longer intellectually defensible, neither was

demonic possession. Although Christ was at one time corporeally present

66

John Gee, The Foot Out of the Snare: With a Detection of Sundry Late Practices and Impostures

of the Priests and Jesuites in England (4th edn., 1626), pp. 32–4.

67

William Perkins, quoted in Robert H. West, Reginald Scot and Renaissance Writings on Witch-

craft (Boston, 1984), p. 120; Scot, Discoverie, p. 2.

68

King James, Daemonologie, p. 40.

69

Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718) [hereafter Hutchinson,

Historical Essay], p. 11.

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

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on earth, that time was over: until the final day, he would be in heaven,
sitting at the father’s right hand. His body could not be incarnated
repeatedly at man’s whim during the administration of the eucharist. Sim-
ilarly, Satan could not be corporeally present on earth – or anywhere
else, for that matter. Sceptic Thomas Ady argued that the differentiation
of spirits according to elemental composition or hierarchical status was
‘dissonant to Scripture, and are only the vain fancies of men, who delight
to fill the world with Fables’.

70

For instance, angels could not be distin-

guished from each other by either their personal names, which simply
reflected their temporary assignments (for example, Gabriel indicated
revelation), or by the names of their orders, which simply reflected that
order’s generic character (for example, seraphim indicated swiftness).
Likewise, all demons are manifestations of Satan, ‘one onely power, all
joyntly combined’.

71

And if spirits were eternal, as scripture said they were,

then devils could not have elemental bodies because all elements were
subject to decay; and to presume that devils periodically renewed their
bodies was absurd.

72

No corporeality among spirits meant no differen-

tiation, no individuality, no personality. Satan had never had any real
power, as we have seen, but now he had no identity at all: he was now
perceived as merely ‘deficiency of being’.

73

If Satan could not be corporeally present on earth, then he could not

be corporeally present inside a human being. Witnesses to dispossessions
became increasingly sceptical since they never seemed to see or hear the
exit of the demons from the bodies of the possessed. To the spectators,
‘there was neither shape seene, nor wind heard, nor motion felt, nor
flames, nor smoake, nor whirling fire-snake perceived at all.’

74

Deacon

and Walker stated that scriptural authority for all demonic possession
was figurative, not literal:

Wheresoever the Scriptures so speak of the possession of divels, they speake
it only by Metaphore . . . And this I say further, that you cannot possiblie
alleadge throughout the whole Scriptures, any one text, wherein either
Angels or Spirits, or Divels are otherwise spoken of then only by metaphor:
the which places being interpreted literallie, would pester the Church with
many absurd and inconvenient opinions.

Satan, they asserted, could do plenty of damage to a man from outside
his body. God would never allow Satan to defile his image, man, by
entering it.

75

Thomas Hobbes nullified the idea of possession with logic.

Existence is predicated on corporeality. Spirits exist, according to scripture.

70

Thomas Ady, A Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661) [hereafter Ady, Perfect Discovery], p. 171.

71

John Deacon and John Walker, A Summarie Answer to Al the Material Points in Any of Master

Darel His Books (1601) [hereafter Deacon and Walker, Summarie Answer], pp. 143– 4, 149.

72

Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, pp. 82–3.

73

Satan, ed. Charles Moeller (New York, 1952), p. xvi.

74

Harsnet, Declaration, p. 142.

75

Deacon and Walker, Summarie Answer, pp. 15–16, 22–3; idem, Dialogicall Discourses, pp. 38–40,

76.

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Therefore spirits are corporeal. But two corporeal bodies cannot occupy
the same space at the same time, so demonic possession is impossible:
‘there be no Immaterial Spirit, nor any Possession of mens bodies by an
Spirit Corporeall.’

76

If demonic possession was impossible, then dispossession was not

good but evil, not prayer but conjuration, not an appeal to the holy but
to the unholy, not consecration but incantation, not an expulsion of Satan
but a beckoning to him. As we saw from the example of John Lane’s
dispossession of Anne Mylner, Protestant dispossession often looked
suspiciously like Catholic exorcism – and all Protestants knew that exor-
cism was conjuration. Did not a Catholic exorcist begin his work by saying
‘I exorcize and conjure’?

77

Had not both conjuration and exorcism for

centuries been considered legitimate practices of Catholic priests?

78

The

identification of dispossession with conjuration ultimately developed into
a Protestant point of faith. Protestants claimed that the Catholics were in
league with Satan to create intentionally ridiculous and suspicious illu-
sions through exorcism, passing them off as miracles in order to discredit
the true miracles of Christ and his disciples.

79

True scepticism regarding

the casting out of demons became the prerogative of the Protestant
thinker.

Gifford, for instance, perceived those who pretended to dispossess

demons as blind fools rushing headlong towards their own damnation:

The conjurors suppose that they bind [Satan] by the power of conjuration
in which they reckon up the names of God, but he is voluntarily bound or
doth indeed but feign himself to be bound . . . [C]an any man be so blockish
as to imagine that God will indeed bind him by his power at the will of a
conjuror?

Satan, in seeming to cease his torments of the possessed and to be cast
out by conjuration, ‘taketh faster hold when he seemeth to be cast foorth,
and doth greater hurt’. To further the demonic illusion that he has been
cast out, Satan:

doth not give place as forced, but ceaseth to do those bodily harmes, that
he may fully win unto himself both body and soule. If they should not
seeme to be expelled, how should men be drawne to seeke helpe at their
hands which deale by him? how should witches and conjurers be drawne
on most horribly to pollute and blaspheme the glorious name of God?

76

Thomas Hobbes, quoted in Witchcraft in Europe 1100–1700: A Documentary History, ed. Alan

C. Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia, 1972), p. 347; see also Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its
Transformations c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997), p. 42; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and
Experimental Science (8 vols., New York, 1941), viii. 551.

77

Scot, Discoverie, p. 242.

78

Mary R. O’Neil, ‘Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in 16th

Century Italy’, Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin, 1984), p. 60.

79

Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, ed. Montague Summers (Aldington, 1951), p. 89.

KATHLEEN R. SANDS

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The pretence of dispossessing demons was preliminary to perdition: ‘what
can be bought more deere than that which is with the losse of soule and
body for ever, by running from God after divels?’

80

Gifford was just one among many. Physicians such as Weyer and

Francis Coxe, politicians such as James I, sceptics such as Scot and Ady,
essayists such as Robert Burton and James Mason, and clerics such as
Perkins, Harsnet and Hutchinson all condemned the dispossession of
demons as ridiculous, blasphemous, tedious, heinous, diabolical, vain,
frivolous, superstitious, intolerable and damnable; the dispossessors them-
selves as sorcerers, magicians, dunces, necromancers, rebels, traitors,
conjurers and enchanters.

81

That Burton, Mason, Ady and Hutchinson

published their arguments after 1604, when the English church officially
proscribed the casting out of demons without an episcopal licence, em-
phasizes that the practice of dispossession continued despite the church’s
ban.

82

Indeed, in the very year of the church’s proscription, the bishop

of Chester issued such a licence.

83

And unlicensed dispossessions con-

tinued to be performed throughout the seventeenth century by Protestant
nonconformists, who attempted to cast demons out of Richard Rothwell
and John Fox in 1612, Roger Sterrop in 1629, the children of George
Muschamp in 1650, Hannah Crump in 1661, James Barrow in 1664,
Robert Churchman in 1682, and Richard Dugdale in 1690.

84

As had been

the case in the previous century, Catholics continued to provide the main
competition to the Protestants through traditional exorcism, attempting
to cast demons out of Grace Sowerbutts in 1612, William Perry in 1620,
a Chester woman in 1663, and a Wigan man in 1691.

85

But the post-1604 arguments also applied to a newer type of dispos-

sessor: those who made no pretence of divine authority. For instance, the
dispossessors of Anne Gunter in 1605 and Henry Smith’s nephew in 1616
were not only women but the very witches who were accused of sending

80

Gifford, Discourse, sig. G1v; idem, ‘A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraft’, The Witch-

craft Papers, ed. Peter Haining (Secaucus, 1974), p. 105.

81

William Perkins, The Workes of That Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the University of

Cambridge, M. W. Perkins (1631), pp. 648–50; Weyer, ‘On the Wiles’, pp. lxi, 351, 371, 431; Francis
Coxe, A Short Treatise Declaringe the Detestable Wickednesse of Magicall Sciences, as Necromancie,
Conjurations of Spirites, Curiouse Astrologie and Such Lyke (1561), pp. 16, 18, 25; Harsnet, Declara-
tion, pp. 17–18; idem, Discovery, pp. 19–20; Scot, Discoverie, p. 220; Burton, Anatomy, p. 384; King
James, Daemonologie, p. 49; Mason, Anatomie, p. 46; Ady, Perfect Discovery, p. 57; Hutchinson,
Historical Essay, p. 145.

82

72nd canon, quoted in Walker, Unclean Spirits, p. 109, n15.

83

Hutchinson, Historical Essay, pp. 210–11.

84

Thomas, Religion, p. 486; Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Two and Twenty English Divines (1660),

pp. 91–4, 216–17 (Sterrop and Muschamp children); Hutchinson, Historical Essay, p. 36 (Rothwell
and Fox), pp. 126–7 (Dugdale); John Barrow, The Lord’s Arm Stretched Out in An Answer of Prayer
(1664), pp. 11–20 (Crump and Barrow); George Sinclare, Satans Invisible World Discovered (Edin-
burgh, 1685), pp. 135–42 (Churchman).

85

Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, in Scott, Somers

Tracts, iii. 8n (Sowerbutts); Ewen, Witchcraft, pp. 116, 236; Hutchinson, Historical Essay, pp. 217–
19; Richard Baddeley, The Boy of Bilson (1622), pp. 46–7 (Perry); Thomas, Religion, p. 202 (Chester
woman); Zachary Taylor, The Devil Turn’d Casuist, or the Cheats of Rome (1696), pp. 3–15 ( Wigan
man).

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their familiars to torment the victims.

86

Similarly, the dispossession of

Katherine Malpas in 1621 was attempted by one Francklin of Ratcliffe,
a practitioner of ‘sawcerie’ who was paid twenty shillings for his services.

87

In 1664, Robert Pyle’s possessing demon was sucked out of his body by
his two young children, who were held to his mouth by his wife.

88

In 1665,

Mary Hale’s possessing spirits, who refused to be cast out by conjuror
Woodhouse, recommended instead the services of his rival, conjuror
Redman.

89

In 1689, the daughter of one Alexander was dispossessed

by an astrologer, who conjured the demon to depart in the names of
Tetragrammaton and the Trinity, accompanying his conjurations with
distillations of marigold, rosemary and angelica, all gathered at the most
efficacious planetary hours.

90

Clearly, the dispossession of Satan no longer

fell within the exclusive purview of the true church, whichever one that
was: it was now also an individual prerogative, increasingly secular. The
evil which occasionally possessed every human body gradually came to
be perceived as more of a medical challenge and less of a spiritual one.

As long as the doctrine of transubstantiation was tacitly conceded to

be an intellectually tenable stance, which was the case as long as it was
perceived as worth arguing against, the English Protestant mind could
also accommodate the parallel idea of demonic possession and its logical
counterpart, dispossession. When, however, transubstantiation was reduced
to a mere alehouse joke, so was possession – and Protestant dispossessors
diminished from miracle-workers to contemptible tricksters. In negating
the real presence of Christ and therefore the real presence of Satan,
English Protestants also negated their power over the latter.

86

Ronald Seth, Children against Witches (New York, 1969), p. 150; Ewen, Witchcraft, pp. 228–9;

idem, Witchcraft in the Star Chamber (private printing, 1938), pp. 28–36; G. R. Quaife, Godly Zeal
and Furious Rage (New York, 1987), p. 153.

87

Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study

(1970), pp. 301–2.

88

Ewen, Witchcraft, p. 403.

89

Ibid., pp. 457–8.

90

Ibid., pp. 110, 460.