Stars, demons and the body in fifteenth-century England

In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, was arrested, together with three associates: Margery Jourdemayne, the ‘Witch of Eye’, Roger Bolingbroke, Oxford cleric and astrologer, and Thomas Southwell, MB, canon of St. Stephen’s, Westminster. They were accused of plotting to kill King Henry VI by necromancy, but contemporary chronicles differed on the precise nature of their crime: had they summoned demons or cast an astrological chart? This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner’s body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit.