ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intellectual basis of witchcraft belief and unbelief, with a particular focus on demonology’s relationship to scepticism – a term which remains rather loosely defined in much of the existing literature on early modern witchcraft. It brings two distinct forms of scepticism together: scepticism in the broad sense of doubt or disbelief concerning witchcraft phenomena, and scepticism in the more technical, philosophical sense: the denial of the possibility of certain knowledge. The chapter argues that these two forms of scepticism have sometimes been unhelpfully elided, and that this conflation has prevented us from asking important questions about the intellectual imperatives driving early modern demonology. Witchcraft provided a particularly fertile breeding-ground for such concerns, because it raised difficult questions about standards of proof and evidence.
