Both in the past and the present, literacy has been seen as a gift enabling people to free themselves from the shackles of 'ignorance' and 'erroneous' belief-systems. Trying to establish firm ground on which to reconstruct the nature of popular literature is not made any easier when the framework is being shaken by historians such as Roger Chartier, who repudiate the very concept of the 'popular' in 'popular literature'. The chapbook reached its zenith during the eighteenth century with the expansion of regional publishers, and it remained a hugely popular literary format up until the mid-nineteenth century. Although much of educated society saw the popular belief in witchcraft as foolish, it was also deemed deleterious, and most certainly a delusion not be nourished in any way. By reporting cases of witchcraft and magic, newspapers were attempting to promote public awareness of the continued 'problem' of popular belief in such powers.

The period of almost 100 years from the Poole project to Whiston's Memoirs was marked by the severing of a connection between the human, natural and spiritual worlds: the providential prodigy. Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume claimed that it would always be more likely that a witness is lying or deceived than that a law of nature be violated. Although this argument is usually treated in the context of the debate on miracles, Hume explicitly declared that it was directed against 'accounts of miracles and prodigies'. From the shadowy producers of the Mirabilis Annus tracts to the natural philosophers of the Royal Society to the Tory journalists of the Exclusion period, a common attitude toward prodigies served as one bond uniting the members of intellectual factions. The fact that prodigies occupied a liminal position between a variety of intellectual realms made them a particularly active site of contention.

Although some social historians have acknowledged the existence of these occult practitioners during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their social significance and influence has generally been underestimated and often totally neglected. They existed in large numbers because many people relied on them to help them cope with a wide range of personal problems and unfulfilled desires. This chapter examines the role and activities of these occult practitioners to gain new insights into the culture within which they operated. Cunning-folk were important figures in the social landscape of provincial England and Wales. Like the clergy, magistracy and constabulary they held a position of authority in rural communities. While rural cunning-folk and fortune-tellers continued to ply their trade using long-established methods, their urban cousins were more readily influenced by the new trends in pseudo-science and supernatural belief which developed and circulated readily in the towns and cities.

Institutional natural philosophy became a permanent cultural presence, whether as a pastime for aristocratic and even royal virtuosos or as a target for satire, and began to include prodigies under its jurisdiction. This chapter examines the activities of the Royal Society and its fellows from the establishment of the Society in 1661 through to the early eighteenth century, as well as of the societies corresponding with the Royal Society, the Oxford Philosophical Society and the Dublin Philosophical Society. It explores some English natural philosophers who corresponded with the Society, identified themselves with its mission and were published in its journals, but were not fellows, such as Joshua Childrey and Samuel Colepresse. Like other royalist writers of the Restoration, Childrey wanted to draw a firm distinction between God's direct actions and mere unusual occurrences in nature. Monsters and prodigies also played important roles in the emerging field of natural theology.

Providential prodigy interpretation and moral reform were old allies, going back to a time before the Reformation, and linked in sermons, pamphlets and ballads. Moral reform and the struggle against atheism had been part of Mathew Poole's agenda, and, while sectarian and political debate dominated the prodigy literature of the Civil War and the Restoration, the tradition of moralistic prodigy interpretation had certainly never disappeared. This new moralistic prodigy interpretation had been anticipated in 1678 in the attempt by an Anglican divine to save prodigies as divine signs by emphasizing the division between valid private judgements and the invalid application of prodigies to public issues. Most interpretaters of the earthquakes avoided apocalyptic predictions. One exception was Thomas Beverley. His 1693 Evangelical Repentance Unto Salvation not to be Repented Of identified the earthquakes both as apocalyptic signs and as warnings to repent.

Even after the Mirabilis Annus affair many prodigies, particularly comets, continued to be interpreted politically and providentially. One of the last major efflorescences of political prodigy writing in England occurred during the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis from 1678 to 1682. One striking aspect of Restoration providential prodigy writing after the Mirabilis Annus affair is the prominence of comets, or 'blazing stars', as paradigmatic providential signs, rather than as one of a number of prodigious phenomena. Christopher Ness discussed a much smaller number of prodigies than had his predecessors in the Mirabilis Annus tracts. The challenge to the providential interpretation of prodigies posed by the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century posed a specific problem for Ness's work. Although the period from the Restoration to the revolution did not end the political use of providential prodigies in England, it clearly identified such use as intellectually and culturally suspect.