The Sorcerer's Tale

The Sorcerer's Tale

by Alec Ryrie
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 31/05/2016

Share This eBook:

  $14.99

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. In this book, Alec Ryrie uses previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career. The journey 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.

ISBN:
9780191578830
9780191578830
Category:
British & Irish history
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
31-05-2016
Language:
English
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
Alec Ryrie

Alec Ryrie was born in London. He studied History and Theology at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and is now Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University.

A specialist on the Reformation, he is the author of `The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England', the prize-winning `Being Protestant in Reformation Britain', and is the co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

This item is delivered digitally

Reviews

Be the first to review The Sorcerer's Tale.