Authors: Barbara Rosen
ISBN-13: 9780870237539, ISBN-10: 0870237535
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Date Published: December 1991
Edition: 1st Edition
Anyone interested in manifestations of witchcraft in Elizabethan and Jacobean England will find this book an invaluable source. Barbara Rosen has gathered and edited a rare collection of documents--pamphlets, reports, trial accounts, and other material--that describes the experience, interpretation, and punishment of witchcraft in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In her introduction, Rosen explores the full range of practices and beliefs associated with witchcraft and situates these phenomena in historical context. She explains how ignorance of science and medicine combined with social circumstance and religious ideology to shape popular perceptions and superstitions. Distinguishing between English and Continental forms of witchcraft, she also examines the legal definitions, disciplines, and punishments applied to wizards, witches, wise women, and conjurers in the Elizabethan age. The pamphlets and other original texts have been modernized in certain respects to make them more accessible to general readers. But the book retains its value for scholars: omissions are detailed in the notes and additions marked; obsolete words and grammar are explained in the glossary. Originally published in England in 1970 under the title Witchcraft, this book appears now for the first time in paperback and includes a new preface by the editor.
Reprint of the Taplinger edition, 1972 (The Stratford-upon-Avon library; 6) to which a new preface, with supplementary bibliography, has been added. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Preface to the Paperback Edition | ||
List of Illustrations | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
I | Introduction | |
Witchcraft | 3 | |
Laws and Punishments | 51 | |
II | Early Days | |
Fault in the Stars | 61 | |
Witches and Fairies | 64 | |
Witches at Chelmsford | 72 | |
Witches at Windsor | 83 | |
Chelmsford Witches Again | 92 | |
III | Law Tricks | |
Witches at St. Osyth | 103 | |
A Comment on Evidence | 158 | |
A Comment on Method | 161 | |
A Miscarriage of Justice | 163 | |
IV | Thick-Coming Fancies | |
Cautionary Tales | 171 | |
More Executions at Chelmsford | 182 | |
Witches' Sabbath | 190 | |
Aerial Adventures of Richard Burt | 204 | |
V | Changing Times: The Tricksters | |
The Fairy Queen in Hampshire | 213 | |
A Country Gentleman | 219 | |
Success Story | 221 | |
VI | Possession | |
The Devil in the Nursery | 227 | |
a) | The disclosing of a late counterfeyted possession | 231 |
b) | The...three Witches of Warboys | 239 |
The Devil at Large | 298 | |
VII | Deaths and Sentences | |
Death of an Earl | 305 | |
Death of a Queen | 310 | |
Opinions of a Judge | 313 | |
Witches Abroad | 316 | |
The Witch in the Alehouse | 323 | |
VIII | Jacobean Style | |
The Swimming Test | 331 | |
Northhamptonshire Witches | 344 | |
Lancashire Witches | 357 | |
Malice and Maleficium | 369 | |
Select Bibliography | 385 | |
Glossary | 392 | |
Index of Familiars | 396 | |
Index of Persons | 397 | |
Index of Places | 404 |