ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The scholars in the book are interested in the historical intersections of early modern superstitions and stage literature. Literary critics and historians engage with a variety of documents, reading them as texts potent and saturated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions. The book addresses the questions of the nature of demonological debates, in their contemporary contexts as well as in their fictional reincarnations in early modern drama, and examines the ways in which superstitions form historically within early modern culture, how they are presented on the London stage, and what it is that happens to them after their stage life expires and they are absorbed once more by early modern society. Both literature and history still construct their premises on inference and experience first; they rely on the researcher's culturally, historically, and theoretically informed creative imagination.
