Early Modern Witch-Trial Skeptic Literature

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while most demonological writers defended the prosecution of accused witches, a smaller current of authors wrote directly against the trials and the beliefs that sustained them. This group gathers three of the most influential works in that skeptical current. Johann Weyer's De Praestigiis Daemonum argued for clemency toward the accused and sought to weaken the legal basis for witchcraft prosecutions, treating many confessions as delusion rather than crime. Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft was written against the belief in witches, arguing that witchcraft did not exist and that supposed magical feats were either deliberate deception or mental disturbance in the observer. Friedrich Spee's Cautio Criminalis, written after Spee personally accompanied condemned women to their deaths, argued that torture could create witches where none existed and that forced confessions could not be trusted. Together these three works mark the emergence of documented, book length skepticism toward the European witch trials.