In April 1602, Mary Glover, the 14-year-old daughter of a prosperous London shopkeeper, quarreled with an old woman named Elizabeth Jackson. A few days later, she fell ill, eventually accruing a number of dramatic, if intermittent, symptoms, including muteness, blindness and a swelling in the throat that made it impossible for her to eat. Glover attributed these symptoms to bewitchment by Jackson, murmuring “hang her” whenever Jackson was brought into her presence. Glover was visited by large numbers of people on her sickbed, and the question of whether her illness was natural or demonic divided London’s religious, medical and legal establishments. The most prestigious members of the London College of Physicians, in alliance with the bishop of Londetn, Richard Bancroft (1544-1610), held that her illness was natural or fraudulent. Bancroft was particularly suspicious of the Glover family’s Puritanism.
Jackson was indicted on December 1, 1602. Unfortunately for her, the judge presiding over the trial was the lord chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Edmund Anderson, a zealous witch-hunter. Anderson demolished attempts to explain Glover’s illness medically, and his charge to the jury virtu-
Ally ordered conviction. Jackson tailed some of the common tests for witchcraft, such as the ability to recite the Lord’s Prayer (this is the first recorded ttse of this test in a court of law) and was convicted and sentenceel to a year in prison. This was the maximtim sentence available under the Witchcraft Act of 1563 for a witch who had not killed anyone. She did not serve the sentence, however, hut was released shortly afterward, probably due to Bancroft’s intervention. Cjlover was exorcised December 14 by a vrotip of Puritan clergy and pious laymen. Bancroft later arrested and imprisoned se'eral of them, he was highly suspiciotis of all exorcising activities since the John Darrell affair.
Intellectually, the most important result of Glover’s case was a work by one of the physicians who had ineffectually testified in Jackson’s favor at the trial, Edward Jorden (1569-1632). Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) ascribed Glover’s illness to “hysteria,” a disease catised by the displacement of the uterus. This was an unusual stance for him to take. The usual disease to which symptoms resembling bewitchment was ascribed was melancholy, not hysteria, a diagnosis that had little currency in England (Jorden’s was the first book in English on the stibject). It was also LinusLial to ascribe hysteria to a woman as young as Glover, as it was usually associated with sexually mature women. Jorden dealt with this objection by broadening the concept of hysteria to assert that it could be caused by problems in the brain as well as the female reproductive system. Jorden placed his writing in the tradition of opposition to witchcraft belief, drawing several examples from Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)—a very bold int)ve given Scot’s bad religious reputation. Jorden would go on to testify for the defense in the Anne Gunter case, another case of alleged possession through witchcraft. Despite the intellectual quality of his work, it was not reprinted until the twentieth century, and melancholy continued to be the mctst common medical diagnosis for symptoms resembling bewitchment.
REFERENCE: Michael MacDonald, ed. Witchcraft arid Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case. London and New York: Tavistock/ RoLitledge, 1991.
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