This month here at Albion Calling I am interviewing Dr. Francis Young, a teacher by profession who is also a historian of early modern England, having just published his important monograph, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 (Ashgate, 2013), for which he was awarded his PhD from the University of Cambridge. A specialist in Roman Catholicism, popular religion, and beliefs surrounding the preternatural during the period, Dr. Young talks to me about his career and research, as well as the state of scholarship on this fascinating subject.
[EDW] In January of this
year you received your PhD in History from Cambridge University, having
previously received a BA in Philosophy at Cambridge and an MA in Classics from
the University of Wales, Lampeter. Can you tell us a bit about your varied
academic trajectory and the path that you took to get to where you are today?
[FY] I
have certainly not come to the PhD by the traditional route; after I graduated
from Cambridge in 2002, I went to teach Religious Studies at a school in
Warwickshire, and after a year I returned to Cambridge to train as a teacher.
Since 2004 I have been teaching in Ely, just north of Cambridge, where I am
involved in running a Sixth Form of around 200 students and helping them apply
to university. Most teachers are much too busy to pursue further degrees, but I
had always harboured a desire to take my academic interests further. I
published my first peer-reviewed article on eighteenth-century English
Catholicism in 2004, but the first years of teaching are very intense and it
was only after a few years that I could contemplate part-time study. I chose to
pursue the Classics degree first, because I wanted to improve the fluency of my
reading of Latin, which is absolutely essential to the study of early modern
history, especially my specialism (Catholicism). However, I ended up writing a
dissertation on early Roman religion (the cult of Hercules).
As for the PhD, the
initial stimulus came from reading the work of Owen Davies, especially his
magnificent Popular Magic (2003). I realised that a very fruitful
direction in which Davies’ work could be extended was through a detailed
examination of the role of popular religion in the English Catholic community,
and I felt that I was ideally placed to do this. Over the years I had built up
a familiarity with the nature and sources of Catholic history, and that,
combined with my ability to read Latin and my interest in popular religion,
gave me the tools I needed to start work on English Catholics and the
Supernatural. I had already begun the book when I discovered that Cambridge
University offers a PhD by publication for its own graduates (as several other
universities do), so I constructed the book with this in mind and submitted it
for examination. The examination process is the same as for any other PhD, and
in November 2013 I was called to defend my thesis in person. One of my
examiners was Prof. Peter Marshall, author of Mother Leakey and the Bishop
and Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, who like me started
with the study of Catholicism and then branched out into popular religion. The
second examiner was none other than Prof. Davies himself. Fortunately, my work
met with their approval (unlike a conventional thesis, a book cannot be
revised, and is either passed or failed!).
[EDW] What is it about
academia that interests you, and what made you decide to follow an academic
vocation? In particular, what is it that sparked your interest in early modern
Catholicism, popular religion, and magical beliefs; something in childhood,
perhaps?
[FY] I
think that anyone who didn’t have an interest in magic in childhood must have
had a very sad one, but the dominant theme of my childhood was an obsession
with the past. The past to me was magical, and from an early age I had an
active interest in folklore and collected books of folktales. At the age of
sixteen I was inspired with a passion for early modern English history by my
then History teacher. He introduced me to the work of Eamon Duffy and
revisionist Catholic historiography (a movement that argues for the vitality of
pre-Reformation Catholicism, and rejects the idea that the Reformation was
somehow ‘needed’). One of the key themes of the revisionist historiography of
the Reformation, and where it crosses over with the history of magic and
popular religion, is that revisionists often reject the ‘Protestant’
distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’. A good example of this
crossover would be Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England
(1994).
In spite of my love of
History I decided to read Philosophy at university, and I became caught up in
the materialistic analytic philosophy taught at Cambridge. What changed all
this was a remarkable individual, Jonael Schickler (1976-2002), who taught me
Kantian and Hegelian philosophy and was also a close friend. Jonael was an
independent thinker of extraordinary brilliance who was working on Rudolf
Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. Jonael challenged my preconceptions, and
showed me that an intelligent person can be interested in esoteric traditions.
His tragic early death, before he could complete his PhD, had a profound effect
on me. Although I was conscious that he and I thought in very different ways, I
felt the need to continue the spirit of his programme of research. One of the
major themes of our discussions over the years had been the theology of angels;
my research in this area led me to early modern demonology and explains why the
theme of exorcism is central to English Catholics and the Supernatural.
[EDW] Last year, Ashgate
brought out your first major monograph, English Catholics and the
Supernatural, 1553–1829, in which you examined the largely neglected area
of popular religion and the preternatural among Catholics in early modern
England. In that book you look at a variety of different aspects, among them
beliefs in the Devil, witchcraft, demonic possession, and ghosts, and the way
in which English Catholics dealt with those issues through exorcism. Given that
it is this work which led to you being awarded your PhD, I’d be interested to
learn how you got started on this project, and to hear a little more about it?
[FY] I wrote an article on Catholic exorcisms in 2009 and was astonished to find that, with the exception of Prof. Alexandra Walsham at Cambridge, no-one had done any recent work on early modern Catholic exorcisms – in spite of the fact that Catholic priests were in demand as exorcists even amongst non-Catholics. Furthermore, it seemed that no-one was taking forward Owen Davies’ insight that there was a connection between demand for exorcism and belief in witchcraft. The aim of the book was always to explain this connection, but in order to do so it became necessary for me to set Catholic attitudes to exorcism and witchcraft within the wider context of Catholic responses to the supernatural (or preternatural, to use the correct but more obscure term). Matters are complicated by the fact that the English Protestant stereotype of Catholics portrayed them as credulous and gullible, so I decided to rely as far as possible on sources produced by Catholics themselves. The major challenge of the project was finding these sources; Catholics were a tiny minority and the literature they produced was tiny in comparison with the torrent of anti-Catholic material. Fortunately, I found a treatise on witchcraft by an eighteenth-century monk (I edited it in entirety for the book’s appendix) which filled an important gap; our knowledge of whether Catholics (usually associated with conservatism) carried on believing in witchcraft later than others. It seems that some did, but my overall conclusion is that Catholics in England were no more ‘superstitious’ than anyone else, contrary to the old stereotypes.
[EDW] Much of your research
has been rooted in your home region, East Anglia. Eastern England is of course
an area with very old, rich associations with folk magic and witchcraft, from
Matthew Hopkins to Andrew Chumbley, but I’d certainly be interested to hear
what you personally find so fascinating about the region, and what makes you
devote so much work to it?
[FY] I
am an East Anglian by birth and, with the exception of one year working in
Warwickshire, I have lived and studied in the region for my whole life. The
counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire (Essex is not technically East
Anglia) are understated in landscape and history, and they are not popularly
associated with mythology and magic like other parts of the country (Wales,
Cornwall, Wiltshire and Cheshire, for example). However, as you point out,
England’s only major witch-hunt took place in East Anglia, and there is a rich
folklore of witchcraft and magic. I recently published a short book which
focuses on witchcraft in and around my current home town of Ely, from the
middle ages to the present day. Certain well-established elements of the lore
of witchcraft, such as witches’ imps and ‘toadmen’, are peculiarly East
Anglian. For me, as an early modernist, the fascination of East Anglia lies in
its religious diversity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it was
quite normal for a village to have a Catholic squire, a Protestant conformist
vicar and a predominantly Puritan population who despised the church. The
dynamics that these religious divisions gave rise to make for fascinating
history.
[EDW] Do you make much
use of archaeological evidence in your work, and what do you see as the
importance for the interplay of archaeological and historical approaches in the
study of the early modern period?
[FY] Revisionist
historiography of the Reformation rejects the automatic primacy of written
sources traditional to Reformation history, and the classic use of material
evidence in the field is Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars, which
puts rood screens in Norfolk churches on a par with official documents. In many
cases, material evidence is all we have for the changes that were happening on
a local, popular level in rural areas. However, if I am honest, the use of
archaeological evidence by early modern historians is still slim. However, it
is clear that there is a great deal of work to be done on material evidence for
witchcraft belief post-1736, and Owen Davies is leading the field. I have
recently been making use of archaeological evidence for the first time in my
own work, since I was involved in the discovery of possible traces of a scheme
of decoration commissioned by Sir Thomas Tresham in a building where he was
held prisoner here in Ely.
[EDW] You employ social
media, including your academia.edu account and blog (https://drfrancisyoung.com/), as a means
of getting your scholarship across to a wider audience. What are your views on
the utility of such mediums for scholarly outreach?
[FY] My
blog is as much a way of keeping track of my scholarly activities for my own
memory as it is for anyone else, since I would not presume that it is read by
more than a tiny number of people! However, it comes in useful at talks and
conferences to have a link that people can go to if they want to download a
copy of the talk or supporting materials. I feel that it is important for
academics to share information, and I am always happy to do so with other
scholars, although I understand that there are legitimate concerns about the
protection of intellectual property. I have always considered that the best
protection against theft of intellectual property is to be an early modern
historian; after all, I don’t make any money out of my research, so I am not
sure how anyone else would! I think it is immensely important for historians to
engage with local communities and act as educators in the broadest sense,
although that is probably most relevant to scholars who, like me, have a local
bias. I have found communicating the history of buildings in Ely or the history
of local witchcraft very fulfilling, and I believe that historians have a duty
to improve the quality of historical knowledge available to non-specialists
whilst not disparaging or patronising ‘popular history’. Misconceptions and
prejudice need to be challenged, and historians are often best placed to do that,
but local history done by local amateurs remains very special and can sometimes
elicit what the ‘professional’ historian cannot.
[EDW] You are presenting
a paper titled “Esoteric Recusancy in the Elizabethan Age: The Occult
Architecture of Sir Thomas Tresham” at the forthcoming Cambridge University
conference, Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality and Visual Culture
(17-18 March 2014). Could you tell us a little bit about this piece of
research?
[FY] In
the paper you mention I will argue that English Catholics were more engaged
with esoteric traditions than has previously been accepted. Thomas Tresham is
the classic example; his symbolic architecture at Rushton and Lyveden has long
been recognised as containing encoded symbolism, but up to now it has been
accorded a purely religious interpretation. Scholars have not really noticed
the Cabalistic and Hermetic influences on his work. In fact, Catholics were
just as interested in the esoteric as anyone else in Elizabethan England, even
though the ‘language of the esoteric’ they used was sometimes different. This
paper is part of my much broader project (my academic life’s work, perhaps) to
shift the focus away from the religious beliefs of early modern Catholics and
onto their cultural and intellectual life as a minority group in English
society.
[EDW] Do you have any
future projects on the horizon that we should keep our eyes peeled for? Any
more publications coming out in the next year or so?
[FY]
I expect the Catholic Record Society to bring out a monograph of mine on
Catholicism in Suffolk before the end of 2014. I am currently engaged in more
work on the history of exorcism and a study of the role of magic in cases of
treason from the middle ages to the late seventeenth century, so I hope that these
might see the light of day at some point in the future.
[EDW] Although it’s a
fascinating subject, I am far from being an expert on witchcraft and folk magic
in early modern Britain; what is the current state of scholarship in this field,
and where do you think it is headed? Where, for instance, do you see the state
of scholarship being in ten, or twenty years’ time?
[FY] The
history of early modern witchcraft and magic has been an exciting place to be
for a long time. It is a cliché (yet largely true) to say that every book that
has been published in this area is an expanded footnote to Keith Thomas’ Religion
and the Decline of Magic (1971). Some of those footnotes, however, have
challenged the tendency of the history of early modern popular religion to turn
into ‘witchcraft studies.’ I do not think it is healthy for ‘witchcraft
studies’ to exist as a separate discipline, because a presumption of the
priority of witchcraft has a tendency to distort the interpretation of other
evidence. That is why Davies’ work on cunning-folk and grimoires is such an
important corrective. I have the feeling that the historical community is
moving towards a more ‘integrated’ approach to the study of all those things
that, at one time or another, the powers-that-be condemned as ‘superstition,’
whether it be fairies, cunning-folk, witches, ghosts or unauthorised exorcisms.
These phenomena need to be studied in their religious, cultural and historical
context and I should like to see an end to the ghettoization of early modern
historians, anthropologists, folklorists, experts in ‘witchcraft studies’ and
historians of esotericism. As the study of esotericism becomes more mainstream
I can see that happening eventually, maybe in ten or twenty years’ time.
To conclude, and because
this is a blog where you interview many scholars whose primary interest is
contemporary Paganism, I want to draw some parallels between studying
contemporary Paganism and early modern English Catholicism. The similarities
may not be immediately obvious, but as someone with an interest in both fields
I notice them all the time. Early modern English Catholics heavily deployed a
rhetoric of ‘the old religion,’ even though, more often than not, there was a
strong element of revivalism and reconstructionism in their practices; some
post-Reformation Catholic practices, such as priestly exorcism, never really
existed in late mediaeval England. In the same way, Pagans make a claim in
favour of ‘elder tradition,’ and disputes about the legitimacy of revival,
reconstruction and lineage have bedevilled Paganism since the 1950s. Catholics
made a claim for the positive cultural benefits of their faith and hankered
after a time ‘when England was merry,’ just as contemporary Pagans associate
their spirituality with festivity and the celebration of life. Just like
contemporary Pagans, post-Reformation Catholics created an ‘alternative
history’ of the landscape and made new sacred sites to replace those that had
been lost. And just like contemporary Pagans, Catholics were much misunderstood
by those around them and suffered as the victims of negative stereotyping,
based on ignorance.
[EDW] Thank you for
talking to us today, Dr Young, and I wish you well with your future projects.
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