The Discoverie of Witchcraft

Reginald Scot went further than any writer of his century in English. Johann Weyer had argued that the women in the dock were incapable of the crime. Scot argued that nobody was capable of it, because there was no such crime. The powers ascribed to witches, he held, belong to God alone, and to credit a village woman with them is not merely cruel but close to blasphemy.

Having removed the crime, he had to explain the trials, and his explanation is close to the one modern historians give. Misfortune arrives, a household needs a cause, and suspicion settles on the poorest and least protected neighbour, usually an old woman who has begged and been refused and has muttered on the way out. Once the accusation is made the process supplies the rest. A frightened defendant confronted with a confident court, held, questioned repeatedly and told what is already known about her, will often agree, and her agreement is then read as proof.

Scot was a country gentleman who had sat in parliament, not a theologian, and his opponents made much of that. What he had instead was a close eye for how people are actually persuaded, and a willingness to say that respectable men in wigs were killing harmless women over nothing. In 1584 that was an extraordinary thing to put in print in English, and most of what he concluded has held.

To make his case Scot had to show that seemingly impossible things have ordinary causes, so he explained how the tricks were done. The book contains working descriptions of sleight of hand, substitutions and staged illusions, including the trick in which a head appears to be severed and restored. It was not written for entertainers, but entertainers found it, and it survives as one of the earliest printed accounts of conjuring technique in English. Magicians have reprinted it for four centuries for reasons Scot would have found beside the point.

Two later stories cling to the book and neither should be repeated as fact. The first is that James VI and I ordered every copy burned when he came to the English throne in 1603. There is no contemporary evidence for it, and modern scholarship treats the story as a later tradition rather than a recorded royal act; what is documented is that James wrote against Scot by name in Daemonologie in 1597. The second is subtler. Seventeenth century reprintings added material Scot did not write, including a discourse on devils and spirits, so an edition bought today may contain arguments its author would have rejected.

The book's real afterlife is stranger than either legend. Because it described the conjurations it meant to debunk, it became a route by which some of that material stayed in circulation, and a work written to end belief in magic was mined by people who wanted to practise it.