![]() ![]() Certes, la plupart des devins-guérisseurs ne possèdent aucun pouvoir surnaturel et tentent seulement d’escroquer leurs patients. Cet article adopte un point de vue plus nuancé. ![]() Selon l’historien Owen Davies, Daniel Defoe représente les devins-guérisseurs comme de véritables charlatans, qui trompent leurs clients pour leur soutirer de l’argent. This goes a long way towards accounting for his ambivalent portrayal of cunning-folk. But Defoe lived in a different intellectual context : that of the early Enlightenment, which was marked by a growing scepticism towards the existence of the supernatural. This was an aim he shared with the Restoration thinkers Méric Casaubon, Henry More and Joseph Glanvill. Indeed, positing the existence of a world of spirits was part of Defoe’s strategy to combat atheism. But Defoe did not discard the possibility that some of those magical practitioners might have enlisted the services of the Devil to achieve their cures. Admittedly, most cunning-folk did not possess any supernatural powers at all and were only trying to swindle their patients. This paper adopts a more qualified point of view. ![]() ![]() Cunning-folk in Daniel Defoe’s Occult TreatisesĪn Insight into Popular Magic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain AbstractĪccording to the historian Owen Davies, Daniel Defoe represented cunning-folk as pure quacks who played tricks upon their clients to despoil them of their money. ![]()
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