Review: Everyday Encounters with Supernatural Forces in Early Modern Britain.
Martha McGill’s British Academy blog post, “Everyday encounters with supernatural forces in early modern Britain”, is a useful reminder that the supernatural was not always imagined as exceptional, theatrical or strange. It could be ordinary. It could be bodily. It could be part of how people understood influence, emotion, illness, temptation, fear and the self.
The post begins with a question from the English physician William Rand, writing around 1650, about how angels and demons might work upon human bodies. Did they enter through breath, pores, or the eyes? To a modern reader, the question can sound unfamiliar, even bizarre. But McGill uses it to open a much more interesting argument: that in early modern Britain, possession by supernatural forces could be understood not only through rare, dramatic cases, but as something closer to routine experience.
What I found most valuable is the way the piece makes the early modern body feel porous. People were not imagined as sealed-off individuals. Their bodies and minds were shaped by humours, seasons, climates, planets, spirits and divine or diabolic forces. McGill’s examples - from humoral medicine and theological writing to the evil eye, Lady Macbeth and visionary experience - show a world in which the self was continually acted upon from outside.
This feels important for folklore studies because it challenges the way supernatural belief is often dismissed as irrational residue. The post does not treat angels, demons or possession simply as “beliefs people used to have”. Instead, it asks what kind of model of the person those beliefs belonged to. That distinction matters. It shifts the question from “why did people believe strange things?” to “what did these ideas help people explain?”
I am especially interested in that shift because it connects to my own thinking about informal archives and vernacular knowledge. Supernatural belief often preserves ways of understanding experience that do not fit neatly into modern categories. A demon, spirit, omen or charm may not only represent fear of the supernatural. It may also offer a language for bodily change, grief, impulse, illness, vulnerability, danger or loss of control.
The post is less focused on class, and that is where I found myself wanting to push the argument further. McGill’s examples are drawn largely from learned, literary, theological and philosophical material: physicians, ministers, natural philosophers, Shakespeare, Robert Burton, visionary writing. That makes sense for the scope of the piece, but it also raises a question I kept coming back to: how did these ideas move between elite explanation and everyday life?
If early modern people imagined bodies as open to outside forces, did that openness mean the same thing for everyone? A scholar speculating about angels entering through the pores was not in the same social position as a poor woman accused of harmful influence, a servant blamed for disorder, or a neighbour feared for the evil eye. Supernatural forces may have been widely understood, but the consequences of being associated with them were not equally distributed.
That is where class, gender and credibility enter the discussion. Who was allowed to describe supernatural influence as theology, medicine or philosophy? Who was more likely to be treated as dangerous, foolish or superstitious? Whose experience became a case study, and whose became gossip, accusation or folklore?
For me, the strength of McGill’s post is that it makes the supernatural feel intellectually serious without making it distant. It shows that early modern encounters with unseen forces were also encounters with questions that remain recognisable: where does the self begin and end? What acts upon us? How do we explain thoughts, impulses or feelings that seem to come from somewhere beyond our control?
As a short public piece, it opens more doors than it closes. It made me think not only about possession, but about how supernatural knowledge travels: from body to story, from story to doctrine, from doctrine to archive, and from archive into the categories we use now.
That is what a good blog post can do. It leaves you with a sharper question than the one you started with.
