ABSTRACT
Criminals in early modern England were assumed to have been tempted by the Devil into committing their crimes. The emphasis on morality and sin in early modern conceptions of criminals and criminality has been extensively studied, particularly in relation to reformation morality and popular print. Witchcraft cases were, in some ways, a more extreme narrative as here the implicit temptation into sin was usually rendered as an explicit compact with the Devil, rather than a devious temptation. Nathan Johnstone has argued that popular publications on sensational crimes repeatedly described how lives of sin led eventually to sinners committing terrible crimes. Examining the narratives of witchcraft found in the confessions of Elizabeth Clarke and the preface written by the editor of the published account of the trials, A true and exact relation, allows the roles of the Devil and human sin in mid-seventeenth-century witch trials to be examined.
