In this interdisciplinary study of eighteenth-century England, Patricia Fara explores how natural philosophers constructed magnetism as a science, appropriating the skills and knowledge of experienced navigators. For people of this period, magnetic phenomena reverberated with the symbolism of occult mystery, sexual attraction, and universal sympathies; in this maritime nation, magnetic instruments such as navigational compasses heralded imperial expansion, commercial gain, and scientific progress. By analyzing such multiple associations, Fara reconstructs cultural interactions in the days just prior to the creation of disciplinary science. Not only does this illustrated book provide a kaleidoscopic view of a changing society, but it also portrays the emergence of public science. Linking this rise in interest to the utility and mysteriousness of magnetism, Fara organizes her discussion into themes, including commercialization, imperialism, instruments and invention, the role of language, attitudes toward the past, and the relationship between religion and natural philosophy. Fara shows that natural philosophers, proclaiming themselves as the only true experts on magnetism, actively participated in massive transformations of English life. In their bids for public recognition as elite specialists, they engaged in controversies that resonated with religious, economic, moral, gender, and political implications. These struggles for social and scientific authority in the eighteenth century provide the background for better understanding the cultural topography of modern society. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and building to a new reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century. Having long referred to magical affinities in the universe, sympathy was increasingly understood to be a force of connection between people. By examining sympathy in literary and philosophical writing of the period, Lobis illuminates an extraordinary shift in human understanding.

The definitive compilation on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era exploring significant people, places, beliefs, and events. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition is the definitive reference on the age of witch hunting (approximately 1430–1750), its origins, expansion, and ultimate decline. Incorporating a wealth of recent scholarship in four richly illustrated, alphabetically organized volumes, it offers historians and general readers alike the opportunity to explore the realities behind the legends of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. Over 170 contributors from 28 nations provide vivid, documented descriptions and analyses of witchcraft trials and locations, folklore and beliefs, magical practices and deities, influential texts, and the full range of players in this extraordinary drama—witchcraft theorists and theologians; historians and authors; judges, clergy, and rulers; the accused; and their persecutors. Concentrating on Europe and the Americas in the early modern era, the work also covers relevant topics from the ancient Near East (including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages.

In the long eighteenth century, sympathy was understood not just as an emotional bond, but also as a physiological force, through which disruption in one part of the body produces instantaneous disruption in another. Building on this theory, Romantic writers explored sympathy as a disruptive social phenomenon, which functioned to spread disorder between individuals and even across nations like a 'contagion'. It thus accounted for the instinctive behaviour of people swept up in a crowd. During this era sympathy assumed a controversial political significance, as it came to be associated with both riotous political protest and the diffusion of information through the press. Mary Fairclough reads Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey alongside contemporary political, medical and philosophical discourse. Many of their central questions about crowd behaviour still remain to be answered by the modern discourse of collective psychology.