The Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Witchcraft in England from
1558 to 1718, by Wallace Notestein
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718
Author: Wallace Notestein
Release Date: March 5, 2010 [EBook #31511]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITCHCRAFT ***
Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Meredith Bach,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
PRIZE ESSAYS
OF THE
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
1909
To this Essay was awarded the
Herbert Baxter Adams Prize
in European History
for 1909
A HISTORY
OF
WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND
FROM 1558 TO 1718
BY
WALLACE NOTESTEIN
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
PUBLISHED BY
THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, 1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911
BY THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THE LORD BALTIMORE PRESS
BALTIMORE, M.D., U.S.A.
PREFACE.
In its original form this essay was the dissertation submitted for a
doctorate in philosophy conferred by Yale University in 1908. When first
projected it was the writer's purpose to take up the subject of English
witchcraft under certain general political and social aspects. It was
not long, however, before he began to feel that preliminary to such a
treatment there was necessary a chronological survey of the witch
trials. Those strange and tragic affairs were so closely involved with
the politics, literature, and life of the seventeenth century that one
is surprised to find how few of them have received accurate or complete
record in history. It may be said, in fact, that few subjects have
gathered about themselves so large concretions of misinformation as
English witchcraft. This is largely, of course, because so little
attention has been given to it by serious students of history. The
mistakes and misunderstandings of contemporary writers and of the local
historians have been handed down from county history to county history
until many of them have crept into general works. For this reason it was
determined to attempt a chronologica
|