ABSTRACT
One of the most important factors about polemics written between 1640-70 was the recognition that the language of demonology was an extremely useful means of expressing religious and political ideologies. Many writers incorporated the language of folklore, superstition and pagan belief into their works, because these subjects were close to popular understanding. One indication of this was the wealth of pamphlets and ballads published during the English Civil War period and beyond, many providing detailed accounts of witchcraft and the supernatural. These writings often converted to a popular form the more serious debates taking place amongst learned theologians and intellectuals by being written in ways that would make them more easily understood by uneducated people. Although the use of dialogues in treatises was nothing new and had always been a common way of conveying an argument to a reader, there is no doubt that the continued popularity of this particular style of writing was to ease the reader’s assimilation of the argument.1 Stuart Clark has argued that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it was a common feature of Protestant demonological polemics to be written in the form of sermons.2 In fact the popularity of such themes was often exploited in sermons in order to remind people of the danger of transgressing accepted religious norms. During the 1650s the memory of the Witches of Warboys in Huntingdonshire in 1594 was said to have been still ‘kept fresh by an Anniversary Sermon preach’d at Huntingdon by some of the Fellows of Queens Colledge in Cambridge V
Indeed the popularity of such accounts and the subject of witchcraft continued well into the second half of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. In 1705 John Beaumont devoted time in his Historical, physiological and theological Treatise o f Spirits, to analyse the pamphlet
1 Both James Vlof Scotland and William Perkins wrote treatises on witchcraft in forms of dialogues: James VI Daemonologie (London, 1597); W. Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art o f Witchcraft (London, 1608).
