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    The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England

    £15.29
    £16.99
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9780199570904
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorRyrie, Alec (Reader in Church History, U
    Pub Date02/09/2010
    BindingPaperback
    Pages224
    Publisher: O.U.P.
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    A lively history set in sixteenth-century England, detailing the hitherto unknown case of an extraordinary physician, magician, and con-man named Gregory Wisdom - and the London underworld to which he belonged.

    An earl's son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it.

    This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man at work in sixteenth-century London. In this book, Alec Ryrie uses previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career. The journey takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious
    upheavals of the Reformation.

    On the way, we learn how Tudor England's dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom's career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. And it provides a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated with new ideas, where it was impossible to know quite what to believe - or who to trust.