ABSTRACT
Our investigation into English witchcraft in the early modern period has revealed that it was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon.which presents formidable challenges to the historical investigator, but which, these challenges notwithstanding, remains a fascinating and rewarding topic. At least part of its fascination is the way in which it shows how an historical problem can be investigated on a variety of levels and through a number of avenues. As I have tried to make clear, privileging any approach to the history of witchcraft runs the risk of over-simplification. Yet I would contend that the subject is best approached on three, albeit interconnected and interacting, levels. There is the one which, since the work of Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas, has been the most familiar, that represented by the sets of issues and type of evidence provided by the witch-trial, and by the build-up of community and interpersonal tensions which so often preceded it. To this must be added the problem of witchcraft as a matter of concern to our early modern forebears on an intellectual, theological, and (to use that modern term again) scientific level. Investigation of this problem has, as we have noted, recently been reopened. To this must be added a third theme, again one which was signposted by Macfarlane and Thomas: namely, how witchcraft and associated beliefs operated in the broader culture of early modern England. These three levels are not mutually exclusive and should be regarded, as I have suggested, as interconnected and interacting. But they do at least permit initial focal points which allow thoughts to be clarified and
evidence to be assessed and organised before moving on to narrower or deeper matters.
