Dangerous Familiars

Dangerous Familiars is a richly textured book that opens up a variety of texts and places them in a complex historical perspective. Dolan's main argument is that the 'familiar' in early modern discourse was frequently construed as a prime source of danger to those within the domestic circle.We may think first of the witch's putative companion in evil, but Dolan, while she devotes her final chapter to witchcraft, wants also to remind us that common and everyday familiars had their pressing dangers-in the form, for example, of tyrannical masters, rebellious household servants, and murderous wives, husbands, or parents. Fear and anxiety about the known rather than the unknown is her theme. Her focus is on violent crime, more precisely on the representation of such crime, whether it appears in legal documents and statutes, ballads, broadsides and pamphlets (the tabloids of their time), learned discourse, or drama.

-- Anthony B. Dawson * Shakespeare Quarterly *

Dangerous Familiars is of more than merely antiquarian interest. Dolan's analysis of the social pressures motivating the production of pamphlets, ballads, and plays, which spread the 'news' of domestic crime in the 1590s, for example, raises intriguing questions about the modes of cultural dissemination that bring us high-tech 'gavel to gavel' coverage of courtroom dramas. Equally relevant to contemporary cultural criticism is her careful unraveling of the complex articulations of gender, race, and class, that inform such cultural productions.

-- Natasha Korda * MLN *

In this brilliant andinnovative book, Frances Dolan argues that the home was no more a refuge from violence in early modern England than it is in twentieth-century North America. Dolan considers not only textual representations of domestic violence but also visual materials, notably the woodcuts included on pamphlet title pages to advertise the sensational wares within.

-- Margaret W. Ferguson * Modern Philolo