The ‘prints’ of the Trials: The Nexus of Politics, Religion, Law and Information in Late Seventeenth-Century England

Although a perfectly clean sheet of plate glass can be a dangerous thing, transparency is usually considered a virtue. Of course, for most early-modern historians, source transparency is rarely a benefit or a problem. Rather the reverse: characteristically, our sources are, in varying combinations, inaccessible, illegible, crabbed and cryptic. When we scrape off these technical layers of opacity, we are still left with the historian’s usual issues of partisanship, outright mendacity, and the subtler effects of cultural divides. Reflexively, therefore, invigilation and interrogation are the order of the day; the unexamined source is not worth using.