ABSTRACT
In 1584 the Elizabethan sceptic Reginald Scot claimed that only the Catholic Church really took witchcraft seriously. Witchmongers and massmongers were one and the same thing, whereas the religion of the gospel could stand ‘without such peevish trumperie’. It was, he said, ‘incomprehensible to the wise, learned or faithfull; a probable matter to children, fooles, melancholike persons and papists’. All the same, he was obliged to acknowledge the demonologies of leading European Protestant theologians like Lambert Daneau and Niels Hemmingsen, and he deplored the way in which the ordinary English clergy lent credibility to popular witchcraft beliefs by recognizing the existence of healers and conjurors in their parishes and making allegations against local witches. 1 In 1653, after nearly seventy more years of active Protestant publishing on the subject, another English sceptic, Robert Filmer, was in no doubt about the essential consensus across denominational lines: ‘for both those of the reformed Churches, as well as these of the Roman in a manner, agree in their Definition of the sinne of Witch-craft.’ 2 This change of emphasis has been mirrored in modern times. Like Scot, Georg Längin and Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan (anti-Catholic) and Johann Diefenbach and Nikolaus Paulus (anti-Protestant) blamed witch-hunting on their religious opponents. 3 More recently, historians have tended to concur with Filmer. H. R. Trevor-Roper argued that the evangelists of all the major churches were equally involved, both at the level of actual prosecutions and in the elaboration of theory, a view in which he has been followed by Jean Delumeau. 4
