ABSTRACT
The dramatic intellectual changes of the seventeenth century had profound effect on the thinking of educated elites. Historians thought that these changes were all that was needed to explain the end of witch-hunting: people became rational and enlightened, and naturally stopped carrying out superstitious practices. Although judicial caution contributed to the decline of witch-hunting in the seventeenth century, most judicial caution was not actually new in that century. Since judges can be influenced by ideological or intellectual considerations, but that influence did have to be felt in the judicial field. These three developments judicial, ideological and intellectual all interacted. All three of these developments fed into a further trend in political culture: the decline of the Devil. Torture had sustained most of the witchcraft panics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it had its own history of decline. The most important new development in seventeenth-century demonological writing was that writers ceased to demand the execution of witches.
