Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England

Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings–bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism–disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.