ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the proof techniques that were in use in early modern English witchcraft cases, their underlying epistemological basis, and how they were shaped by the surrounding social context. The early modern English mostly agreed that solid and infallible evidence was the solution to the problem of proof. Infallible evidence, the early modern English believed, was a good solution to the question of proof. It is important to remember that evidence is more than a bundle of rules and that modes of proof are embedded in wider judicial strategies. The purported rationale for these rules was the advancement of fact-finding, the discovery of the truth. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, some of the evidentiary rules aimed at preventing the exposure of jurors to inappropriate evidence. Legal scholars' emphasis on the rationality of the method of the rules of evidence ignores much of the process of their creation through a socio-cultural struggle.
