ABSTRACT
The account is the first pamphlet on English witchcraft to be wholly composed of third-person narrative since Richard Galis’s A Brief Treatise (1579). Like Galis’s account, it uses no documents and presents itself instead as a story told by a respectable narrator – with equally limited success. Newes from Scotland, a pamphlet concerning witches at North Berwick, had been published only a few months before A Most Wicked worke (1592) and is also a narrative account, so G.B., a Master of Arts whose identity is not known, had a more recent model for telling his story.1 In this case, there may have been no trial from which to draw documents. Since many legal records for London and Middlesex in this period are missing, we cannot know whether this Middlesex case resulted in a trial or not. But whatever the reason, narrative was the pamphleteer’s preferred generic model, and the pamphlet thus marks a move towards storytelling and away from documentary reproduction. Like Galis and the author of Newes, G.B. is a reasonably cultivated writer: his pamphlet is prefaced by a poem and a biblical quotation, and expressed in language which at times is flowery and elegant, euphuistic and entertaining. He may have been involved with the study of law, for legal terminology repeatedly flavours the pamphlet despite the absence of actual legal documents. The preface shows a growing interest in the demonological, listing Satan’s names and ‘explaining’ their significance. Thus the stress is on elegant and accessible narration, not on stilted hopping from one examination to another.
