Afterlives of Endor: Witchcraft, Theatricality and Uncertainty from the Malleus Maleficarum to Shakespeare

Tuesday, November 7
12:30 - 2:00 pm EST
Cabaret Theatre (3rd Floor)
721 Broadway, NY 10003

Join Theatre Studies Professor Laura Levine as she discusses her book, Afterlives of Endor: Witchcraft, Theatricality, and Uncertainty from the Malleus Maleficarum to Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2023), in an interview with John Dietrich.

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.

About Laura Levine

Laura Levine has published widely on Renaissance drama and culture. Her first book, Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 1579-1642, examined anxieties about boy actors in women's costumes on the early modern stage. Her new book, Afterlives of Endor (Cornell University Press), looks at fears about witchcraft in the broader context of anxieties about the power of theatrical representations. She has published on subjects ranging from associations between conjuring and rape to ballet adaptations of Shakespeare and held awards from the NEH, Folger Shakespeare Library, NYU Humanities Center, and former Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute. Co-founder of the Drama Department's honors program, she is a recipient of NYU's Distinguished Teaching Award. 

Please RSVP to lauraellenlevine@outlook.com by Sunday, November 5, indicating your preference for in-person or hybrid attendance.