The Devil in Disguise - Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment

Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise - Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 279, hb. £30.00, ISBN: 978-0-19-957795-8.In 2005 Mark Knights published Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture, a remarkable study of 'the intersection between politics, society, ideas, and modes of communication' in later Stuart Britain in which he argued persuasively that the modern emphasis on the participatory nature of early modern English politics needed to be balanced by a little more attention to representation. In other words, without denying the importance of all those vestries, juries, militias, corporations and trading companies, the mechanisms that allowed early modern Englishmen to participate in the political process, he demonstrated that representative institutions and practices - parliaments, elections, and petitions - were significant in themselves and as major forms of participation. As voters, petitioners and readers, the English were required to assess and judge political questions. Knights skilfully teased out the nature of the 'public' that was represented through bodies such as the commission of the peace or the vestry, and in actions, above all, in petitioning and addressing: he exploited more than 5000 'addresses' and 500 'associations' subscribed across the country between 1679 and 1716 to show how these 'subscriptional genres' forged a vox populi out of discordant voices, a national political culture out of local politics, and then went on to question our assumptions about a growing confidence in public reason during the period. As he showed, there was a real anxiety about the unreliability of the public's judgment throughout these decades. Partisan political discourse was shot through with ambiguity and tension. Inherently unstable, full of the very dangers that it preached against, the political discourse of Whig and Tory parties subverted the notion of truth as it claimed to be asserting it, corrupted voters in the very act of advising them against that danger, and made partisan use of a rhetoric of impartiality. Misrepresentation was as prevalent as representation in the later Stuart period.Knights has now returned to some of the same themes, but from the other end of the historical telescope. His new book is a fascinating, busy, case study of three scandals touching on one family in one English town between 1699 and 1712. Hertford suffered a febrile political life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when the Whig Cowper family were ensconced in Hertford Castle and were repeatedly at odds with their local political rivals. Knights's accounts of the 1699 trial of Spencer Cowper for the supposed murder of the Quaker Sarah Stout, of the furore surrounding his promiscuous brother William Cowper's alleged 'bigamy', and of the 1712 trial of Jane Wenham for witchcraftare woven into much broader discussions of political partisanship, the press, visual propaganda, marriage, feminism, science, religious intolerance and delusion. …