Preternature V5:1

This issue focuses on specific texts that have been previously neglected but that nevertheless have far-ranging implications for the study of the preternatural. In the first of our four articles, Agnieszka Rec publishes, for the first time anywhere, an edition of the oldest surviving alchemical text by a Polish author, the Fundamentum scienciae nobilissimae secretorum naturae of Adam of Bochyn. In the second essay, Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien offers a close examination of Matthew Hopkins’s treatise The discovery of witches (1647), placing it within the social and political context of the English Civil War. In the third essay, Stuart McWilliams adds to our understanding of Aleister Crowley by illuminating the occultist’s relationship to the history of book production and its relevance to Crowley’s place in intellectual history. Lastly, Jacqueline Pearson provides a new approach to the preternatural works of writer Elizabeth Bowen by examining an incident from Bowen’s ancestry: the appearance of the apparition of Col. Bowen to his wife, as documented by Richard Baxter in The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691).