Magic and Reputation in England c.1500-c.1800; contextualising magic in a society of credit

This project will explore how witches, cunning folk, and other alleged or professed practitioners of magic in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century England developed reputations for supernatural power. By drawing on the literature of reputation and credit, it will seek to understand what reputation meant for these people and their place in a society that revolved around credit and worth. This will contextualise magic as part of a reputational society rather than as something auxiliary and introduce elements outside the usual categories to current discussions of worth.