The Discoverie of Witchcraft

£1,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

remarkable treatise debunking the existence of witchcraft An excellent, limited edition printing of this seminal treatise debunking the belief in witchcraft, reproducing the text and woodcut illustrations in full, with an introduction by the occult historian Rev. Montague Summers. The discoverie went well beyond even the arguments made in Johann Weyer's earlier De praestigiis damonum (1566) to refute the foundation for the belief in witches. Chiefly Scot maintained that all those who had been executed so far in England were innocent, attributing manifestations of supposed witchcraft to imposture and cheap tricks. Books 13 and 14 are largely given oven to an exposé of these illusions and cozening devices. Scot also asserted that none of the terms translated in the Bible as 'witch' held that meaning in the original tongue, undermining the key justification for the prosecution of witchcraft as a crime against God. In demonstrating that belief in witchcraft and magic has no basis in religious or rational thought, Scot listed 212 authors of Latin works and 23 authors in English, including Thomas More, John Bale, and John Foxe, who informed his attack on 'witchmongers', those who sought 'to pursue the poore, to accuse the simple, and to kill the innocent.' Instead he explains the phenomenon as resulting from sociological causes: poor women, often lying-in maids, blamed for the deaths of infants under their care. A remarkably modern assessment which chimes with current academic thin

• Binding: Hardcover

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