Abstract
The demoniac’s experience, in its spreading severity, may appear at first blush to have been unusual, but spiritualities, prophetic and malefic, could be ecstatic and expansive. They were celebrated and critically considered. Spiritual experience was both intensely personal and communal. Female prophets, for instance, sang incessantly to audiences while they ached and starved. They spoke of hell and damnation broadly and easily while their actions were recorded. These furies were spiritual and wrathful. Dorothy White railed against Oxford; Sarah Wight turned her anger into self-loathing; but in prophesying these women spoke out with an authority that came from outside of them. They worked for God and trumpeted his message. However, prophetic utterances were only considered authentic when the prophesier lived and looked like a prophet. She needed an audience to validate her claims and a spiritual alias, or a spiritual second-self, to validate what she was saying. Failure or inability to do so might mean being saddled with the epithet of tub-preacher.
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Notes
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© 2015 Kirsten C. Uszkalo
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Uszkalo, K.C. (2015). Performance | Contamination. In: Bewitched and Bedeviled. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498229_5
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