The Discovery of Witches

The Discovery of Witches, Matthew Hopkins's own 1647 pamphlet, is a primary text in which the self-styled Witch Finder General defends his own methods of interrogation and detection, framed as answers to queries put to him about his practice. Its authority is that of a direct firsthand statement by the practitioner himself, valuable precisely because it is his own justification in his own words. Its limit is total: it is a defense written by the accused practitioner about his own controversial methods during the East Anglian witch trials, not an independent or neutral account of what those methods actually involved or their effects. Cite it only as Hopkins's own stated self-justification.