The sorcerer's tale
Subtitle: faith and fraud in Tudor England
By: Alec Ryrie.
Publisher: Oxford University Press; Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 207
ISBN-13: 9780199229963
Subjects: Wisdom, Gregory, -- d. 1599; Westmorland, Henry Neville, -- Earl of, -- 1524 or 5-1564; Swindlers and swindling -- England -- History -- 16th century; Magic -- England -- History -- 16th century; Conspiracies -- England -- History -- 16th century; Crime -- England -- London -- History -- 16th century; England -- Social conditions -- 16th century; Great Britain -- History -- Tudors, 1485-1603
Description: An earl's son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it. This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man at work in sixteenth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career, Alec Ryrie takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation. On the way, we learn how Tudor England's dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom's career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. And it provides a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated with new ideas, where it was impossible to know quite what to believe--or who to trust.