Tells a story of injustice and passionate resistance to religious persecution in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Through an analysis of a sensational series of demonic possessions and exorcisms, this book highlights the existence of controversies in print in the late Elizabethan period of the kind that would one day lead to civil war.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1 A Literary Geography of Exorcism: 'Farre from the Eye of Justice'; Chapter 2 'A Booke Declaring the Fearfull Vexation': Spreading the Word; Chapter 3 'Sinnful, Shamfull, Lying and Ridiculous': The Possession of William Sommers; Chapter 4 'Pare Thy Nails, Dad': Authority and Subversion in Possession Narratives; Chapter 5 Dialogicall Discourses and Summarie Answeres; Chapter 6 The Madman in the Wilderness;