One quick addition: Katharine Briggs' *Anatomy of Puck* and *Pale Hecate's
Team* have appendices with early modern MS spells etc. that require some
awful Latin and what I assume is worse Hebrew, not to mentions some very
peculiar ingredients that I could probably find in New York but not in
more respectable parts of North America. A few photocopied pages are fun
to hand out in class. How to get a fairy, how to summon a demon, etc.
Anne.
> Katharine Briggs' ever-useful *Dictionary of Fairies* is interesting on
> Hobgoblins, though rather tantalizingly so. It points out that the word
> was
> originally applied, somewhat affectionately, to mischievous or
> brownie-type
> spirits, as in *Midsummer Night's Dream* ('Those that Hobgoblin call you,
> and sweet Puck,/ You do their work, and they shall have good luck'), and
> that its application to wicked spirits was a Puritan usage: she gives the
> example of Bunyan's 'Hobgoblin nor foul fiend'.
>
> If we accept that basic distinction it seems probable that Harvey's
> Hobgoblin/Apollo comparison belongs to the first type, garland-stealing
> being the kind of thing that might be expected of a mischievous Puck, and
> Spenser's later drery-accented frayers to the second. We could have fun
> speculating whether this indicates a definitive shift in usage between the
> composition of the two texts, or a distinction between Harvey's and
> Spenser's religious affiliations, but more likely both meanings were
> current, and either could be used depending on context, as was certainly
> the
> case with a word like 'fairy'.
>
> I wonder, incidentally, whether Anne's demons are specifically incubi and
> succubi (certainly an object of fascinaton for Spenser, and a worldwide
> phenomenon as far as I can see, though their activities don't form part of
> the hobgoblin's usual job description), or workers of more general-purpose
> marriage-wrecking illusions?
>
> Charlie
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 9:10 PM
> Subject: Re: forward from Thomas Herron
>
>
>> Interesting. There is another complexity here, which is that the
>> placement
>> of the stanza as well as its context suggests, I think, that Spenser has
>> read the Catholic Sarum Missal (the default Missal for England, although
>> not the only one, and I assume for Ireland) and its marriage service.
>> There's reason on other grounds to think he read it (see an essay by Hal
>> Weatherby on the end of Book I); there must have been an awful lot of
>> them
>> hanging around, althought Tom Herron has sent me a wonderful quotation
>> from Barnaby Googe about the anger of the locals when the English
>> authorities tried to remove the old Catholic prayerbooks). In the
>> Catholic
>> service of the time, then, there's a marvelous prayer in which the
>> priest
>> blesses the bed and prays that, among other things, it be free from
>> fantasy, from "demonibus illsionis"--Spenser must have enjoyed thinking
>> about how good a prayer this is. The demons of illusion have hurt many a
>> marriage! Whether the demons and/or illusions are local Irish ones or
>> English imports is another question, but the threat to marital happiness
>> by being frayed by things that be not is worldwide. Anne Prescott.
>
