Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Portrayal of Attitude in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets

2012; Routledge; Volume: 84; Issue: sup1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00393274.2012.686220

1651-2308

Carla Suhr,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback that helped to improve this article. Notes 1 See the Appendix for a list of the corpus texts and the short titles used to identify them in this article. See Suhr (Citation2011: 49–60) for a more detailed description of the corpus. 2 Translations and texts printed outside England or Scotland were excluded from the corpus, as were reprints or new editions of texts included in the corpus. The page limit of 48 pages was set on the basis of the minimum price of pamphlets (two pence, according to Clark [Citation1983: 25]) and the number of sheets required for printing them, as paper was the most expensive component of pamphlets. 48 pages equals six sheets of paper in quarto size, or three sheets of paper in octavo size; these were the most common formats of pamphlets. In fact, all but three of the corpus texts are made up of less than four sheets of paper, and two thirds of the texts, mostly from the latter half of the seventeenth century, consist of less than two sheets of paper. With the average retail price of texts at halfpence per sheet before 1635 (Johnson Citation1950: 93) and a penny per sheet at the end of the seventeenth century (Raymond Citation2003: 82–83), this gives an average retail price of tuppence for the corpus texts. Raymond (Citation2003) places the maximum length of pamphlets at 96 pages, and Bach's limit is 64 pages (Citation1997: 15). Previous historical studies of witchcraft pamphlets do not limit the length at all, and include texts of well over 100 pages in their discussions (Notestein Citation1968[1911]; Rosen Citation1969; Gibson Citation1999, Citation2000). 3 An excellent survey of English witchcraft is Sharpe (Citation2001). The seminal works are still MacFarlane (Citation1970) and Thomas (Citation1971). 4 There are two controversies over sensational witchcraft cases in 1701 and 1712, but they are polemical rather than popular pamphlets. Many of the texts taking part in the controversies are much longer than the 48 pages that is considered the maximum length for pamphlets in this study. 5 I follow Martin and White (Citation2005) in using small capital letters to avoid confusing the labels of sub-categories and sub-systems of appraisal with more general usage of the words "attitude", "appreciation", "affect" or "judgment". 6 In all examples, the emphasis in bold is mine but italic typefaces are original. 7 Martin and White (Citation2005) use the terms "inscribed attitude" for explicitly (i.e., lexically) portrayed attitude and "invoked attitude" for implicit attitude. Invoked attitude can be analyzed on a cline from the "less" implicit "provoked attitude" to the "more" implicit "afforded attitude", but this study only includes provoked attitude, since the interpretation of the "more" implicit kinds of attitude is problematic for historical materials, where the precise context and reader position is not always clear. In the interest of using familiar terms, in this study "explicit attitude" refers to Martin and White's "inscribed attitude" and "implicit attitude" to their "provoked attitude". 8 There are a total of 2701 expressions of attitude in the corpus. Of these, 1900 express judgment, 467 express appreciation, and 335 express affect (Suhr Citation2011: 199–200).