James Hobbs

Thesis

The Rhetorics Poison: Poison, Witchcraft, and Sexual Deviance in the English Political Imagination 1615-1660

Supervisor: Professor Mark Jenner

Research

My thesis focuses on the related imagery of poisoning, witchcraft, and sexual deviance as it appeared in media about court scandal in seventeenth-century England. It asks why such imagery co-occurs so frequently, despite taking different forms and being used by people with widely varying political goals. In doing so, it investigates the variety of poisoning and witchcraft tropes that appear in political media, paying particular attention to the ways differences in gender, age, and social rank could change the way poisoner and victim were discussed. It will argue that these differences in the way poisoning narratives were told indicates that the rhetoric of poison, witchcraft, and sexual deviance could take on much more varied meanings than previous scholarship has suggested.

My thesis draws on a wide variety of sources to show how widespread this rhetoric was. The core body of sources includes printed pamphlets, ballads, and works in the “secret history” genre and manuscript libels and polemics, all of which deal with the scandals in question. This foundation of political discourse is supplemented by works which are not directly related to contemporary political events but nonetheless serve as a valuable point of comparison to those that do. For example, with its robust tradition of imagined or semi-imagined political narrative, tragic drama is particularly useful, not least because poison, witchcraft, and sexual deviance were important tropes on stage. Similarly, crime literature offers valuable insight into the way murder and witchcraft were viewed, and court performances show some of the languages of power that the rhetoric of poison drew on.

Papers and Publications

Conference Papers 

• “Poison and Bodily Permeability in Seventeenth Century England.” Presented at Boundaries in the Long Seventeenth Century, White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities, January 2025 
• “Bit Players in Conspiracy: Narratives of Thomas Overbury’s Other Murderers.” Presented at Corruption and Scandal in the Early Modern World, Institute for Historical Research, June 2025
• “‘The Devill of our Nation:’ Male Witchcraft and Court Scandal in Seventeenth Century England.” Presented at CREMS Magic and Witchcraft Conference, University of York, June 2025