ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about 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 possession and exorcisms, it highlights the existence of controversies in print in the Elizabethan period of the kind that would one day lead to Civil War. One of the narratives referred to most often in pamphlets about the John Darrell exorcisms as a model for fraudulent young demoniac is The Most strange and admirable discoveries of the three Witches of Warboys. As the complex histories of the first texts on Darrell's work in Burton and Nottingham suggest, what was going on at a literary level at the dispossessions of Darrell and his friends was just as important as their political or otherwise factual context. It is also one of the best examples of the topos of the dysfunctional family, and its association with and healing by godliness.
