Samuel Harsnett - Religious Views

Religious Views

Harsnett is noted for his sceptical attitude towards demons and witchcraft. As the chaplain to Bishop Bancroft, Harsnett was commissioned to write a treatise condemning the 1590s exorcisms of John Darrell, having sat on the 1598 commissions which investigated his activities. Darrell, curate at St. Mary's Church, Nottingham was a puritan minister who performed a series of public exorcisms in the English Midlands. Eventually, the exorcisms caused such a disturbance that they attracted the attention of Anglican authorities in London. Harsnett's A Survey of Certain Dialogical Discourses was a polemical piece intended to discredit Darrell's puritan agenda. It was drafted as a piece of political propaganda, but it also genuinely questioned the belief in demons. In this way, Harsnett sought natural explanations for supposedly supernatural phenomena.

In 1603, he wrote another book, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published by order of the Privy Council, which condemned exorcisms performed by Roman Catholic priests in the 1580s. Shakespeare used this book as a source, pulling words and phrases when writing the play King Lear, mainly spoken by Edgar while he feigns madness and John Milton is said to have been influenced by it when writing L'Allegro.

As a member of England's religious authority, Harsnett's sceptical attitudes, divided equally between puritanism and popery, set important precedents for English policy. For example, by coming close "to denying the reality of witchcraft" he may have contributed to the relative lack of witch hunts in England, compared to other countries.