England's First Demonologist

Reginald Scot and 'The Discoverie of Witchcraft'

Philip C. Almond

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857732187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religionsgeschichte

The fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man, that few or none can indure with patience the hand and correction of God.' Reginald Scot, whose words these are, published his remarkable book The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584. England's first major work of demonology, witchcraft and the occult, the book was unashamedly sceptical. It is said that so outraged was King James VI of Scotland by the disbelieving nature of Scot's work that, on James' accession to the English throne in 1603, he ordered every copy to be destroyed. Yet for all the anger directed at Scot, and his scorn for Stuart orthodoxy about wiches, the paradox was that his detailed account of sorcery helped strengthen the hold of European demonologies in England while also inspiring the distinctively English tradition of secular magic and conjuring. Scot's influence was considerable. Shakespeare drew on The Discoverie of Witchcraft for his depiction of the witches in Macbeth. So too did fellow-playwright Thomas Middleton in his tragi-comedy The Witch. Recognising Scot's central importance in the history of ideas, Philip Almond places his subject in the febrile context of his age, examines the chief themes of his work and shows why his writings became a sourcebook for aspiring magicians and conjurors for several hundred years. England's First Demonologist makes a notable contribution to a fascinating but unjustly neglected topic in the study of Early Modern England and European intellectual history. 'This is the first full-length study of what to most people is the most famous and influential book about witchcraft to emerge from early modern England; and it significantly advances our knowledge of both text and author.' - Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol

CHAPTER ONE

‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’

The Book

In 1597, King James VI of Scotland published his Daemonologie. It was a work that he was moved to write by his belief in what he called ‘The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devill, the Witches or enchaunters.’¹ James himself had been the target of a plot by alleged witches in Scotland in 1590–1, so it is little wonder that his mind was focused on witchcraft in this period. And it is not surprising that he felt that he needed to quell the doubts of many ‘that such assaults of Sathan are most certainly practized, & that the instruments thereof, merits most severely to be punished.’² For James, one of the chief instigators of scepticism about witchcraft was Reginald Scot, ‘an Englishman,’ wrote James, who ‘is not ashamed in publike print to deny, that ther can be such a thing as Witch-craft: and so mainteines the old error of the Sadducees, in denying of spirits.’³

Reginald Scot had published his work on witchcraft some thirteen years before, in 1584. As the title of Scot’s work makes clear, with the exception of natural magic, Scot was critical not only of the possibilities of witchcraft but also of the whole panoply of matters occult, divinatory, and esoteric:

The discoverie of witchcraft, wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knaverie of conjurors, the impietie of inchantors, the follie of soothsaiers,the impudent falsehood of cousenors, the infidelitie of atheists, the pestilent practices of Pythonists, the curiositie of figurecasters, the vanitie of dreames, the beggerlie art of Alcumystrie, The abhomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the vertue and power of naturall magike, and all the conveiances of Legierdemaine and juggling are deciphered: and many other things opened, which have long lien hidden, howbeit verie necessarie to be knowne. Heereunto is added a treatise upon the nature and substance of spirits and divels, &c.

The work as a whole was comprised of some four hundred and eighty-eight pages in sixteen Books and two hundred and forty-nine chapters. This was supplemented by ‘A Discourse Upon Divels and Spirits’ of some seventy-one pages in thirty-four chapters.⁴ It was England’s first major work on demonology and witchcraft and it was unashamedly and unapologetically sceptical. But paradoxically, the comprehensive account of magic, witchcraft, and legerdemain contained in The Discoverie of Witchcraft fostered European demonologies in England, helped the spread of indigenous witchcraft traditions, and inaugurated the English tradition of secular magic and conjuring.

There is a tradition that King James VI of Scotland, on his accession to the English throne in 1603, the same year in which his Daemonologie was published in England, ordered all copies of The Discoverie of Witchcraft to be burnt. Although James was prone to burning books as demonstrations of his theological and political agenda, the evidence for his burning Scot’s work is not strong. And it is highly unlikely that he did so.⁵ Still, the development of the tradition is evidence of the influence of Scot and the awareness from an early period of the radical nature of the position adopted by him, both by those who were opposed, and by those who were sympathetic to it. As Thomas Ady noted in 1656 in his A Candle in the Dark, this book ‘did for a time make great impression in the Magistracy, and also in the Clergy,’ though, he went on to say, since that time England had shamefully fallen from the truth contained within it.⁶ And John Webster in his The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft some twenty years later named Scot and the German physician Johann Weyer as the two persons who so ‘strongly opposed and confuted the many wonderful and incredible actions and power ascribed unto Witches’ that loads of ‘unworthy and unchristian scandals’ were cast upon them.⁷

Thomas Ady and John Webster were the first two English writers openly to defend Scot. But he clearly had supporters, albeit more reticent ones, in later Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Thus, for example, in 1593 the poet Gabriel Harvey in his Pierce’s Supererogation declared, ‘Scotte’s discovery of Witchcraft dismasketh sundry egregious impostures, and in certaine principall chapters, & speciall passages, hitteth the nayle on the head with a witnesse ...’⁸ In the same year, Thomas Nashe indirectly defended it in his Foure Letters Confuted.⁹ In 1601, as sceptical of the claims of those possessed by devils as of those who exorcised them, the Anglican clergymen John Deacon and John Walker endorsed Scot’s opinion that the witch of Endor, far from conjuring the spirit of Samuel to appear before Saul, was nothing but a trickster.¹⁰ Samuel Harsnett, as doubtful of the authenticity of demoniacs and as sceptical of those who reputed to cure them as his Anglican colleagues Deacon and Walker, borrowed material (though without citing Scot) from The Discoverie of Witchcraft.¹¹ William Shakespeare drew on Scot for his depiction of the witches in Macbeth, as did the playwright Thomas Middleton in his portrayal of ‘The Witch’ in the tragi-comedy of the same name.

Still, his critics were much louder than his supporters. There were more of them, and they included the major English demonologists. Thus for example, in 1587 in England’s second work on witchcraft, A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers, George Gifford clearly had Scot in mind when he declared his intention to provide ‘an Aunswer unto divers frivolous Reasons which some doe make to prove that the Devils did not make those Aperations in any bodily shape.’¹² William Perkins objected in 1608 to Scot’s suggestion that, if witches worked wonders, it was through divine rather than demonic power.¹³ John Cotta in his The Triall of Witch-craft in 1616, accused him of confusing witches and tricksters.¹⁴ The Discoverie of Witchcraft was as important a point of reference for confutation for Richard Bernard in his A Guide to Grand-Jury Men in 1627,¹⁵ as it was for support for Francis Hutchinson in his sceptical An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft.¹⁶ And there can be little doubt that the ever credulous Joseph Glanvill had Scot in mind in his adoption of the neo-Platonic account of the ‘vehicles of the soul’ to argue that demons had bodies of air in order to counter Scot’s rejection of the possibility of demonic bodies.¹⁷

As a consequence of its comprehensiveness, The Discoverie of Witchcraft was also an invaluable source of information on magic, demonology, witchcraft, spirits, divination of many kinds, and legerdemain. In the course of its production Scot had mined a vast array of contemporary and ancient sources. At the beginning of the work, he listed two hundred and twelve Latin, and twenty-three English authors whose views he quoted, analysed, and criticised.¹⁸ His writing probably began in 1580 after the publication of Jean Bodin’s De la Démonomanie des Sorciers (On the Demonomania of Sorcerers) in that year. And he continued to read fresh works right up until shortly before he completed the work. Thus, for example, Scot writes of the treatise of Leonardus Vairus on fascination as ‘now this present yeare 1583. newlie published.’¹⁹

He undoubtedly had some help, notably from Abraham Fleming. It is now recognised that Abraham Fleming was the editor of the 1587 posthumous edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles. He was a publishing entrepreneur, and for the decade before the publication of the Chronicles he had been involved with at least fifteen publishing houses in a variety of roles – poet, translator, editor, compiler, indexer, and corrector.²⁰ It was to Holinshed’s Chronicles that Scot was to contribute one of the three extant pieces of writing by him about which we know.²¹ This was a long account of the rebuilding of Dover Harbour, one of the great feats of Elizabethan engineering. Reginald Scot had been involved in this project, along with his cousin Sir Thomas Scot to whom he addressed one of four prefatory epistles at the beginning of The Discoverie, and the mathematician Thomas Digges.²² It was probably Abraham Fleming who was the recipient of a now missing letter by Scot about his cousin Sir Thomas Scot. This was cited by Francis Peck in his Desiderata Curiosa (Curious Desiderata) in 1732 as ‘An Epitaph upon the Death of the famous & renowned Knight Sir Thomas Scot ... with divers Historical Notes. The whole written by Mr. Reynold [sic] Scot (Authour of the Discovery of Witchcraft) & sent, as thought, to be inserted in the late new Edition of Holingshed; but not permitted. A curious Thing.’²³

In The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Fleming is regularly credited with the translation from Latin of much poetry from the Classical poets – Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius, for example and others – into English. Thus, we find some twenty-eight times ‘Englished by Abraham Fleming’ or a variation of this in the margins of the text. And the importance of Fleming’s contribution is reinforced by the playful presence in the list of foreign and English authors of the exotic–sounding anagram ‘Gnimelf Maharba.’ Certainly, both Fleming and Scot shared an anti-Catholic fervour. As we will explore more closely later, they may have also shared other decidedly more unorthodox theological views.

The publication history of The Discoverie of Witchcraft can be quickly noted. The responsibility for the publication of the work was taken by Scot himself. No record of it appears in the formal index of printed works of the period, the Registers of the Company of Stationers. We can reasonably assume that Scot expected only trouble from any attempt to do so. The name of the printer William Brome, usually on the title page of any work, occurs at the end of the book with no date and no address other than London (though we know from a comment within The Discoverie of Witchcraft that his shop was in St. Paul’s churchyard.) An abbreviated Dutch translation, Ondecking van Tovery, was made in 1609 by Thomas Basson, an English printer living in Leiden at the time. A revised version was published by his son G. Basson in 1637, also in Leiden.

Another edition of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in 1651, had a different title page from the original edition of 1584, one that was more likely to attract the eyes of the book buying public. For, in comparison to Scot’s original title which suggested that there were such things as witches who dealt ‘lewdly’, this title suggested that there were no witches, and that old, sad, and ignorant people were the innocent victims of the machinations of the witch-hunters. And it is directed at readers far more sceptical of the legitimacy of the judicial processes involved in witchcraft prosecutions than those of Scot’s time.

Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft: Proving The common opinions of Witches contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars; and their power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men women, and children, or other creatures by diseases or otherwise; their flying in the Air &c. To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and novelties; Wherein Also, the lewde unchristian practices of Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant, and superstitious people in extorting confessions, by inhumane terrors and tortures is notably detected... . With many other things opened that have long lain hidden: though very necessary to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices, and Juries, and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant people; frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for Witches, when according to a right understanding, and a good conscience, Physick, Food, and necessaries should be administred to them.

It was a marketing ploy that worked, for there was a second printing of this edition in the same year, and a further one in 1654.²⁴

A third edition of The Discoverie of Witchcraft appeared in 1665. It appeared with a different title page from both the first and second editions though it promoted the same message as the previous edition. There were, however, two significant additions to the text of this edition, by an unknown author,²⁵ which were announced on the title page. Although there is ambiguity on the page, the careful reader would have concluded, correctly, that these additions were not from the hand of Scot. The first was an additional ‘excellent Discourse of the Nature and Substance of Devils and Spirits’,²⁶ the second an additional nine chapters inserted at the beginning of Book fifteen.²⁷ As we will see in more detail later, both of these countered the overall message of the work. For they focused on the description of and the conjuring and invoking of ghosts, demons, and spirits, and they assumed the truth of that which Scot had wished to demonstrate as trickery. In short, in form and content, they belong to the genre of the grimoire, and were no doubt used as such by later generations of Scot’s readers.

Indeed, we can gain some insight into the use of Scot’s book for divinatory or conjuring purposes from an account by the Essex Justice Sir William Holcroft of the prosecution in 1687 of Ann Watts, a fortune teller from London who had been sleeping rough in the woods of one of Holcroft’s neighbours. In her possession were a number of books, no doubt the tools of her trade, among which there were said to be two works by the magician Cornelius A...