ABSTRACT
In England, witchcraft and witch-trials prior to the mid-sixteenth century remain obscure and ill-documented subjects. In the aftermath of the trial and conviction of the Catholic plotters, the Privy Council seems to have pushed for new laws against Catholics, sorcerers, witches, and false prophesies. For witchcraft to operate, three elements were needed: divine permission, satanic power and malevolence, and human agency in the shape of the witch. The demonologists then had the problem of explaining why God allowed witchcraft to happen at all, an interesting facet of the broader question of how Christian theologians accounted for the presence of evil in the world. The tendency to regard official attitudes to witchcraft mainly as a religious affair, and for historians of the topic to concentrate on witchcraft as something essentially of concern to peasants, has tended to obscure the more general importance of magic and the occult in educated culture.
