"Basting the Lambe: Witchcraft, Court Scandal and the Lynching of the Duke’s Devil, June 1628"

Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2003 @ 7:30pm
Willard Smith Library

Alastair Bellany
Associate Professor of History
Rutgers University

An Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Alastair Bellany followed an Oxford (Balliol) undergraduate degree with his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton. Published by Cambridge in 2002, his The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660 offered a revised reading of this scandalous affair from the often overlooked perspective of public information and reception as well as its long-term political context. His various articles in such volumes as the Journal of British Studies, Huntington Library Quarterly, English Historical Review (forthcoming), and Tim Harris’s edited The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500-1850 focus on themes of scandal, libel, and subversion. In addition to co-editing a volume of Early Stuart verse libels, he is currently at work on a revisionist reading of the 1628 Buckingham assassination.