This was a very well written social history about how the manifestations of abnormal behavior and suspicion showed the anxiety and instability within the time period. The book examines locally published pamphlets, court histories and church registries to explore how outlying events say something about what the common people were doing and thinking, especially as this is a period without a huge amount of written records.

This is a period of huge religious and political unrest. There were questions about the continuation of the monarch with the Tudor line coming to end, there were issues with having female monarchs for the first time, there were struggles against changing social mores with the loss of the strict Catholic church while the Anglican/Puritan infrastructure was still developing and then of course you have the chaos of the English Civil War. While it is easy to dismiss these cases as tabloid speculation, I think the author does a good point of showing how a trail of cases like these can be connected to the instability. He never uses just one case, there is always a string.

immigration and as those fears develop there is a rise in the number of these ( )

This is a book I bought from Oxford University Press online shop sale without knowing very much about it. I took about four months to finish this book, reading it a chapter at a time in between other books, so by the time I reached the conclusions I had all but forgotten the early chapters. Cressy examines stories of unusual pregnancies, midwives, small religious communities and the like. ( )