‘He falls a bleeding’: nosebleeds and providence in the early modern English imagination

Instances of nosebleeds signifying guilt or portending death appear in a range of printed pamphlets, ballads, and dramatic works published in England during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reflecting a widespread belief in God’s care for victims of murder and his divine judgement of killers, providential nosebleeds, like cruentation and ghostly visitations, helped spread the conventional idea that ‘murder will out.’ Nosebleeds, however, differ from other supernatural occurrences that lead to the detection of killers and confession of the guilty because they were employed more flexibly and often disparaged by sceptics. This flexibility, as well as gendered understandings of passive bleeding, highlight the complex imaginative response to nosebleeds in the early modern era.