A Discovery of the Impostures of Witches and Astrologers.

£4,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Wing B4698. Rare. ESTC records copies at BL, Cambridge, Glasgow and National Library of Scotland; Folger, Huntington, Newberry, Trinity College and Yale. A re-issue was published in 1686 with a new title page cancelling A1-2 and quire *. The re-issue is also rare with only five copies recorded in ESTC. No copies recorded at auction on Rare Book Hub since 1956 save for a defective (title-page missing and supplied in manuscript) and “badly worn” copy at Bloomsbury in 2004. Two works bound together on the falsity of astrology published over one-hundred years apart. “Hence proceed those swarms of Fortune-Tellers, Geomancers, Diviners and Interpreters of Dreams, who possess the common people with apprehensions, that they know all their fate, the number of their days, the casualties of their life; and even their natural inclinations, and thoughts of their hearts: by this means cheating the poor innocent souls into the grossest superstitions imaginable” (A4, Preface). An impassioned plea by John Brinley of Brockton, Staffordshire to his neighbours not to be seduced by “such men, who practice unlawful arts” and that many illnesses and unusual occurrences can be ascribed to rational reasons. He notes that “there is nothing…more usual with the Common people, than to ascribe to Witchcraft, all Disasters, or Diseases whatever seeming strange to vulgar sense”(p.15). He lists a number of afflictions - such as hydrophobia (after the “biteing of a Mad-dog”) and attempts a rational explanatio

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