Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension

'Throughout this work Cressy shows the fruits of diligent archive work. One gets a clear and very useful impression of the multiple levels of the distribution of power and government, and particularly of the rhetorics within which they operate... Every piece here is stimulating.' -Reformation'Of interest to historians, literary scholars, and historical anthropologists... a fine interdisciplinary study.' -Sixteenth Century Journal'In this highly readable and instructive book, the well-known social historian David Cressy tells fifteen stories of strange or troubling incidents... he seeks to avoid the conventional formulation of a problem and a hypothesis and a 'clear sense of closure', relying instead on laying out his evidence as fully as possible, listening carefully to the 'voices of the past', and remaining alert to multiple connections and layers of significance.' -Ralph Houlbrooke, Times Literary SupplementIn Travesties and Transgressions, David Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. He shows how unorthodox happenings bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, excommunication and irregular burial, nakedness and cross-dressing disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.