Magic, disease, uncanny creatures, and strange little elves that embody the wicked practices in Anglo-Saxon England. Based on a review of the literature, such as critical editions, essays and translations, the study aims at analyzing the profiles of these odd creatures in the Medieval medical manuscripts known as "Leechbooks", representing a significant part of the Old English literature. First, the paper focuses on the analysis of the paleography and contents of these Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, namely Bald’s Leechbook, Leechbook III and Lacnunga, in order to understand the nature of the texts and to scrutinize how medicine and heathen beliefs were strictly connected during the medieval period. Secondly, attention is drawn on the Germanic literary context, in which elves acquired several connotations, from fascinating and interesting living beings to monstrous and dangerous beasts. In particular, the paper aims at taking into account the most remarkable attestations of the Germanic literatures, Caedmon’s works, Beowulf, Judith, Edda, to identify the roles that the elves played even in the Christian texts. Finally, a group of recipes and spells contained in the Old English Leechbooks is selected and examined with regard to language, use and meaning during the period. Therefore, the purpose is to reveal the role of these magical and illustrious creatures that still today are included in our collective imagination.

In the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Orfeo, Orfeo’s wife Heurodis is kidnapped and whisked off to Fairyland by a sinister figure known simply as the Fairy King. In this medievalisation of the classical legend of Orpheus, the abductor is transformed from the pagan god of the Underworld to a fairy captor of indeterminate ontological status and inscrutable motivations. As a distinct subset of the supernatural, fairies occupied an interstitial conceptual and hermeneutic category, signalling multiple ontological registers while at the same time being incapable of being neatly retrofitted within any available interpretative frameworks. Indeed, the only unifying factor in the literary representation of medieval fairies was their unassimilable nature. As a fairy monarch, Orfeo’s Fairy King is similarly poised between multiple modes of representation, containing echoes not only of his pagan progenitor but also of comparable supernatural beings found in the mythographic corpus of insular folklore as well as the Devil of the Christian imagination. Fairyland in this romance is also fashioned as a realm of alterity, an amalgam of the dread portals of the Underworld of classical legend, the intermittently-accessible Otherworlds of Celtic myth, and the infernal topography of Biblical Hell.
This paper will attempt to situate the Orfeo-poet’s deployment of supernatural machinery within the context of medieval beliefs about the supernatural as a distinct ontological category as well as a device of narrative structuring. In particular, this paper will assess the role and function of fairylore within the broader field of custom, practice, and belief in the supernatural in the cultural imagination of the Middle Ages, arguing that the romance's presentation of the Fairy King and Fairyland as discrete and singular entities constitutes a unique achievement, a testament not only to the protean nature of ideas about the supernatural that existed in medieval society but also to the creative potential of the romance poet.

In Renaissance history of medicine, Paracelsus propounded a theory opposed to traditional Galenic theory of curing like with like. He attempted cure for difficult physical as well as mental diseases through this alternative theory that also freely made use of alchemy, astrology and magical or supernatural (hyperphysical) ways. Among his followers Heinrich Khunrath and other alchemists made use of ancient alchemy and hermetic knowledge. Alchemy turned out to be a life-changing process of reform of the spirit with close connection with Christianity instead of mere production of gold out of base metal. This spiritual alchemy with its emphasis on spiritual and religious improvement had a major influence on European understanding of alchemy as a wise man’s quest. Carl Gustav Jung found the symbolism of alchemy to be appropriate for psychotherapy as it could suggest the encounter with the unconscious and help understand the difficulties in the process of individuation. Following alchemists Jung tried to unravel the mysteries of psychic transference. In this paper I used the Renaissance alchemical theory to look at the convoluted psyche of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the manner of Jung. If we understand their pursuit of the crown as a play of desire in which they seek the help of the dark forces of the unconscious and fall victim to those forces, then we may interpret their pursuit in terms of Renaissance spiritual alchemy as a failed experimentation. In his pursuit Macbeth fails to harness and handle his anima and is destroyed by the dark forces of the unconscious. In alchemical terminology, the self is the lapis or philosophers’ stone. Macbeth fails in the production of this ‘gold’, i.e. his integrated self. The alchemical conjunction that is supposed to lead through death to the rebirth of the self, in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s case turns out to be fatal and horrible. Their encounter with the numinosum ironically leads to destruction instead of resurrection.

In 1613, Frances Howard (later known as Frances Carr), petitioned for an annulment of her marriage to Robert Devereux, the 3rd Earl of Essex, to whom she had been married in 1604, when she was fourteen years old. The grounds for claiming the annulment was the non-consummation of the marriage, with Howard claiming that her husband was impotent. The earl denied the charges, going as far as to claim that he was perfectly capable of intercourse with other women, but that Frances had never allowed him to consummate the marriage.
Since Howard wanted the annulment in order to marry Robert Carr, who was the current favourite of James I, James took a personal interest in the case and tried to use his influence to secure the annulment. Since the Archbishop of Canterbury was one of the authorities who could rule on the matter, James put pressure on George Abbot, who was the Archbishop at that point, to agree to the annulment, going as far as to suggest that perhaps the Earl of Essex was under the influence of witchcraft, which made him unable to consummate his marriage to his wife.
Abbot, however, refused to be pliant. In a letter written to James I that year, a copy of which is part of the Thomas Murray Papers (MS 663) of Lambeth Palace Library, and which was reprinted as part of a large pamphlet, The Case of Impotency as Debated in England, published by the notorious publisher Edmund Curll in 1715, he takes a very rational stand on the matter, not only demanding proof of such witchcraft, but also refuting points made in favour of the idea that witchcraft was involved.
This article will attempt to examine Abbot’s letter, the response by James I (also in the form of a letter) and some related texts in order to demonstrate how Abbot attempted a rational inquiry (as far as rationality went in that period) into a subject that was widely believed in by virtually every social class in England at that time, and also how his language negotiates his political obligations to James I and his own position as an arbiter.

This article positions Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) in the critical tendency called ‘Gothic Marxism’. In most critical commentary on the subject, that tendency is epitomised by the spectropoetics of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and by Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) monsterpiece – the first volume of Capital (1867). The article provisionally regards Engels’s first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), as the Ur-text for ‘Gothic Marxism’. Among other momentous turns, Condition morphed Eugène Sue’s social supernaturalism and Thomas Carlyle’s ‘real-phantasmagory’ towards Communism. It mashed-up eldritch, monstrous and nightmarish figures; anticipated Marx and Engels’s apprehension of bourgeois society’s sorcery in the Manifesto as well as Marx’s depiction of Capital as vampiric; and exposed bourgeois fairy tales – in the industrial pastoralism of Andrew Ure’s fanciful philosophy, child factory workers became ‘lively elves’ – as bloodthirsty apologias for ‘social murder’. The article foregrounds the supernatural register and revolutionism of Engels’s work and, especially, the subterranean metaphor of his and Marx’s shared Gothic imaginary. It contends that Engels’s critical engagement with Gothic supernaturalism was integral to his scientific-socialist struggle to articulate underground passages up through and beyond the ideologically-naturalised precarity of Capital’s encrusted monstrosity. It concludes that the Manifesto, like Condition, adapted Gothic horripilation for pedagogical and polemical purposes, to incite the living dead to unbury themselves collectively by revolution from below. A coda speculates that Gothic scholar Frederick S. Frank’s sub-category ‘grotto gothic’ could be applied to extensively elucidate Engels and Marx’s representation, across Capital’s three volumes, of the proletariat as ‘encaved’ in a capitalist underworld and of the revolutionary potential embodied by that subterranean class.

The rakshasi is a supernatural figure that is mythic, folkloric as well as literary in South Asian culture. Evil, monstrous, with a terrifying visage but capable of transforming her appearance at will, she has been defined by these characteristics. This paper will concentrate on the figure of the rakshasi as she appears in the Bengali rupkatha tradition, particularly in the works of Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar and Reverend Lal Behari Day. This literary tradition grew out of an oral storytelling tradition that had existed in the region for centuries and developed at the intersectional moment of Bengal’s colonial encounter and the rise of a nascent nationalist consciousness during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Mitra Majumdar’s work can be located within the project of the swadeshi cultural revival that was integral to the political resistance to the colonial state after the first partition of Bengal in 1905. This socio-political-cultural context of the development of the literary tradition had profound impact on the texts themselves, as the ideological situation of the authors informed both the writing of the texts as well as the process of selection of the stories in their volumes. The figure of the rakshasi that appeared in these texts was an amalgamation of folkloric beliefs along with the contemporary hegemonic conceptions of womanhood that was an important part of the nationalist consciousness. Bengal had inherited a rich tradition of supernatural lore as part of its folklore which was a living breathing tradition at the time. Thus the interaction of folk beliefs along with Bhadrolok conceptions of undesirable womanhood makes for a fascinating study. This paper will attempt such an enquiry.

Be it stories of Calcutta’s origin in the marshes plagued by wild animals or the ruthless dacoits dominating its streets in its early years later to be replaced by the solitary, lurking criminal, Calcutta has, for centuries now, been a witness to the danse macabre of corpses. In an article titled, perhaps ironically, ‘A Real, Live City,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote about sleeping among the vicious odours of late nineteenth century Calcutta ‘…it is remarkably like sleeping with a corpse.’ This macabre description of the colonial city sets the mood for its continual depiction as a necropolis or the city of the dead. The paper will begin its analysis of Calcutta’s depiction as a Gothic city in various works of fiction and non-fiction. In this it will take into account the etiology and the evolution of the ‘urban gothic’ offered by Robert Mighall in The Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, and relate it to Calcutta and Bengali ghost stories set in it.
Subsequently, the paper will closely examine Bengali ghost stories and the way urban space is represented therein to exacerbate, as it were, the sense of the uncanny. It will explore the interaction of supernatural presences, both spectral and non-spectral, and the urban space of colonial and postcolonial Calcutta. Take, for instance, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s 1930 story, ‘Andhakare’ or ‘In the Darkness.’ Here, the narrator finds himself stranded in the waterlogged city in the middle of a massive power failure. In the eponymous, and typically urban darkness, a ghostly voice guides him home through the labyrinthine city. Here, the ‘total’ sensory perception of the city barring the visual offers a fascinating construction of a dark city which both produces and is produced by supernatural presences. My paper will look into this Gothic production of urban space.

This paper seeks to look at how the people and social geography of the Sunderbans figure within narratives from mainstream Kolkata-centric bhadralok identity projects. The figure of the Bengali has long been conflated into the figure of the bhadralok within Bengali cultural productions, to the extent that within mainstream representations of the Bengali, the bhadralok is assumed to be the key if not sole spokesperson of the deeply heterogeneous Bengali communities. This normative stance creates in its wake a crisis of representation that would be reductive to name solely in terms of the binary of the bhadra and the abhadra. This paper translates and examines a ghost story for young adults by one of the most well-known names within the Bengali literary canon: Atin Bandyopadhyay— “Atapur’s Bhoot” (“Atapur’s Ghost”)— to see how the uncanny is produced, otherised and identified with even as it is alienated within the liminal spaces in-between Bhadralok domains and the hinterlands of the Sunderbans. Within the understanding of this paper, the hegemonic bhadralok gaze that informs (even as it is destabilised by) the story at hand is a crucial tool to access that which the story foregrounds as the haunting spectre.Further, a close reading of the story shows how Timothy Morton’s deconstructive reading of “nature” and paradigmatic shift to the term “ecology” extends to people(s) inhabiting the locations too “natural” to be accommodated in discourses of bhadralok modernity. It explores Atin Bandopadhyay’s perpetually liminal authorial identity as simultaneously a bhadralok and a refugee from the Sunderbans-Bangladesh borders, and links it to the ambivalences surrounding the surreal in his stories. In doing so, it argues that understanding these identity projects in terms of perpetual liminality or border dwelling is more productive than erstwhile Global South frameworks like that of Partha Chatterjee’s relevant but too insular demarcations between civil society and political society.

In the introduction to They Suck, They Bite, They Eat, They Kill: The Psychological Meaning of Supernatural Monsters in Young Adult Fiction, Joni Richards Bodart asserts that “monsters can also teach us about how to build our own concept of morality, based on how we relate to the monsters in the story—are we the ‘good guy’ or the ‘bad guy,’ acting with or without honor?” (xxiv). It is this moral development that is demonstrated by Theseus Cassio Lowood, the protagonist of Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood series. While Cas, as he prefers to be called, begins the series as a ghost hunter intent on eliminating any threatening spirits, his moral development over the course of the two books demonstrates that the choice of who “lives” and “dies,” even among spirits, is a complicated moral issue. This paper examines Cas and his growing relationship with Anna, the murderous spirit he intended to kill, from a feminist care ethics perspective. I argue that evaluating Cas and his changing sense of morality from the perspective of feminist care ethics, with its focus on individual situations and relational identity as the heart of ethics, illustrates the growth that problematizes Cas’s previously established moral perspective on ghosts as monsters unequivocally in need of destroying. As Cas’s relationship with Anna grows and develops, he finds himself in the position of carer whose moral obligation is to care for Anna’s needs. Cas’s moral journey then becomes to discover the history behind Anna’s murder and determine whether or not she is a threat to the safety of others for whom he is a carer and whether or not he is then still morally compelled to kill her. The development of Cas’s morality, as the way he relates to “monsters” changes throughout the series, exemplifies how feminist care ethics problematizes binaries of right and wrong in issues that are seen by others are purely black and white.

Explorations of the power and place of rage have long been a part of activism, culture, and writing when considering the black experience in America, even more so when we view that experience through the lens of the supernatural. In works such as Victor LaValle's graphic novel Destroyer, what makes the feminine monstrous is not their looks or even their acts but rather their rage, more specifically that these "monsters" dare to express their rage in visible ways. On the surface, Destroyer is a retelling of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein with Dr. Baker filling in the role of Dr. Frankenstein and her murdered son, Akai, in the part of "the monster." However, beyond that, Destroyer is a story about a black mother's rage over her child's murder by a police officer. What drives home the horror of this story is not Akai's reanimated body but the unstoppable rage of a mother, who will not only rebuild her child but also destroy the world that allows little black boys to be gunned down by authority figures. This discussion utilizes the work of Victor LaValle to help explore the roles of femininity and monstrosity in black speculative fiction. What does it truly mean for a black character to be labeled monstrous and feminine when we consider a social history that so often denies black women their femininity and is often generous in its applications of monstrosity to blackness? Why are these stories so often told using supernatural elements when the reality is just as if not more horrifying? To explore those questions, this argument poses that characters such as Dr. Baker use their rage as a subversive strategy to escape the confines of the social hierarchy and respectability politics using monstrosity as a transformative catalyst for social change.

The Bible is regarded as the source of inspiration for various literary works and one of the primary faculties in Western theological institutions. An anthology of books harbouring the initial conception of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, it has been constructed, re-constructed, edited and compiled across ages. Presenting the dogma of Christianity through its own institutional and spiritual evolution, it has been quoted, cited and pointed to by well-known figures of the History of English Literature such as John Milton and William Blake. The recognition of its role in the world of literature would be presented in this collaborative academic paper through a strict analysis of the symbolic significance of the miraculous events in the Bible, with special reference to the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus from the Old Testament and the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Revelation from the New Testament.

In our contemporary milieu, the diseased body has become an object of study to be viewed through various “models” that are frequently locked in combat with each other. The phenomenon of the pandemic has, in recent months, emerged as a site where these competing discourses battle each other out. In our times, the “scientific” medicine-based model of approaching disease may surface as the normative or desirable one, whereas the religious model, conflated with the superstitious, and together comprising the supernatural, may appear as its nemesis. Any such demarcation of the “supernatural” in the early modern conception of disease, including contagious disease, becomes problematic as the schema through which the world was viewed at that time was significantly different from ours. The realm of the supernatural, in itself, was also subject to splits, like that between religion and magic, as emerges significantly in a post-Reformation milieu, or that between benevolent and malevolent magic. The proposed paper intends to draw upon Gilman’s reading of Donne as plague writer, where he studies Donne’s sermons at the time of plague, and his poem An Anatomy of The World, and finds in him the last successful accommodator of the problem of the plague into the language of theology. The proposed paper seeks to read these works against the contemporary early modern discourses of plague and its relation to the supernatural, and particularly, against the new split that had been occasioned in the realm of the supernatural by the politics of post-Reformation England. The plague emerged, in early-modern Europe, as a site of polemic battle that sought an other to pin blame upon, while consolidating processes of nation-building and expansions of state power. Against such a backdrop, the proposed paper seeks to examine Donne as a figure of exception in his naturalisation of the plague, whose supernatural connotations were, in popular imagination tied to divine intervention in, and abrogation of, the natural scheme of things. By moving away from seeing the plague as a state of exception, and by retaining certain elements of the older Catholic schema of looking at disease, Donne circumvents, and perhaps seeks to transcend the new factionally charged split in the realm of the supernatural. The proposed paper hopes to generate new insight regarding Donne as intervener in the discourse around plague and the supernatural in his time, and, in the process, throw light upon the interconnectedness of different disciplines that have come to be regarded as mutually antagonistic and exclusive in our times.

There are few writers as eerily fascinating in their renditions of the phantasmagoric as H. P. Lovecraft. As this year’s theme for Critical Imprints is the Supernatural, who better than S. T. Joshi to steer us effortlessly into this spectral realm that beckons exploration? A renowned writer and an unquestionable expert on Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi has dedicated many years of his life, time, and research to studying this strange writer and his weird fiction.
Apart from Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi specialises in fantastical and supernatural fiction on a broader spectrum. He has also provided noteworthy criticism on modern writers such as Stephen King.
Luckily for us, S. T. Joshi’s brilliance does not deter him from engaging with enthusiastic audiences. Even in the harsh circumstances of the pandemic, he generously agreed to take time off his schedule in order to respond to a prepared interview questionnaire on H. P. Lovecraft, making this volume of Critical Imprints doubly special.
His free spirit and vast knowledge shine through in each answer, only increasing our knowledge of the peculiar genius who said: “Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”