Reginald Scot had no obvious business writing this book. He was a country landowner in Kent who sat once in parliament, and his other published work was a practical guide to growing hops. He had no theological training, which his opponents used against him, and no professional stake in the question at all.
What he wrote in 1584 went further than anything else in English for a century. Johann Weyer had argued that the defendants were incapable of the crime. Scot argued that everybody is, because the crime is not a possible thing. The powers attributed to witches, control of weather, of health, of another person's body, belong to God. To say a poor woman in a Kentish village holds them is not just a mistake about her; it is a claim about the order of the world that Scot thought close to blasphemous.
Having taken the crime away he still had to account for the trials, and his account is the modern one. He describes an old woman who begs at a door and is refused, mutters as she leaves, and is remembered when the household's cow sickens a week later. He describes what happens to a frightened, isolated person questioned repeatedly by confident men who already know the answer. And he notes, drily, that the woman herself may come to believe it.