ABSTRACT
This pamphlet is the meeting point of a number of different discourses in writing about witchcraft. It is, for example, clearly related to contemporary accounts of possession. The Most strange and admirable discoverie (1593), one such account, deals with the supposed witchcraft attack made on the Throckmorton family of Warboys (in Huntingdonshire) by mother, father and daughter of the Samuel family. ‘Mother’ Alice Samuel was employed by the victims, and their children first accused her of causing their fits and trances, before widening their denunciations to include her husband and daughter. The Witches of Northamptonshire picks up some of the themes of the Warboys pamphlet: motiveless attack on virtuous victims, bewitchment/possession of wealthy people by their social inferiors, inter-familial conflict, witchcraft as an inherited crime, order and godliness versus disorder and vice. Gilbert Pickering, the witch-hunting uncle of the victims of Warboys, makes a reappearance. He attempted diagnostic experiments with the suspected witches and the children in the early 1590s, and these are echoed here, twenty years later, in his attempt to try the Bill family by the swimming test. The reporting of events is similar in each work too: narrative accounts of events interspersed with comment, and without much recourse to documentary proofs. Whilst The Most strange and admirable discoverie is much longer and more thorough than the later pamphlet, The Witches of Northamptonshire shares the concerns, the godly frame of reference and the form of the earlier work.
