Title: Cruentation and Imagination in the Context of Renaissance

Abstract: Cruentation received official approval as solid judicial proof against potential murders throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practical value of this strange custom is to make decision-making process externalized and efficacious as well. After being dramatized and represented both in family tragedies and pamphlets in English Renaissance literature, this legal practice became the subject of heated debate, drawing the attention from physicians, natural philosophers and theologians. The evolution of the discussions on cruentation can be taken as a window through which to look at the relation between life and death, natural and magic and miraculous of early modern Europe.

Keywords: cruentation, magic, imagination, English Renaissance

Author: Xiaodong Xu, Professor, School of International Studies, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.02.004