Content area
Full Text
Stephen Brogan. The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2015. xii + 265 pp. Ill. £50 (978-0-86193-337-2).
Historians have long recognized that Tudor and Stuart monarchs touched and apparently cured thousands of people suffering from the King's Evil. In 1911 Sir Raymond Crawfurd published on the topic. Thirteen years later Marc Bloch brought out Les Rois Thaumaturges. In 1971 Keith Thomas discussed it in Religion and the Decline of Magic.1 However, medical historians are often unsure how to integrate it into their accounts of the period. The royal touch often seems an embarrassing relic of the political and medical ancien régime, something with no rightful place in a world of case histories, chemical cures, and decapitated kings.
Stephen Brogan's thorough study, the first book-length analysis of the topic since Bloch, adds considerably to our knowledge. He retraces its medieval origins, its adaptation after the Reformation, and its continuation under the Stuarts. The longest section analyzes the remarkable success of the royal touch after 1660. Charles II touched nearly 100,000 people; James Il's Roman Catholicism did not prevent many coming for monarchical therapy. Although William III abandoned it, there was considerable demand when Queen Anne revived the practice. Brogan carefully dissects the...