Introduction

There are not many history books which entirely change the perception of their chosen field of study. One such was Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a Regional and Comparative Study, which was first published in 1970. The work originated as an Oxford University D.Phil. thesis completed under the supervision of Keith Thomas, then fellow of St. John’s College, whose own magisterial study of popular beliefs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Religion and the Decline of Magic, appeared a year later.1 The treatment of witchcraft in the latter book, where it constituted a major theme, overlapped with Macfarlane’s, and one can imagine how ideas about the subject had flowed between student and supervisor in an intense and fruitful intellectual exchange. But while Thomas’s study has remained in print since its first appearance, Macfarlane’s more focused work has not been available for some time. To say that the decision to reprint it which has resulted in this new edition is welcome would be a massive understatement. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England represented a remarkable methodological and conceptual breakthrough in the study of a particularly intractable, and much misunderstood, historical problem, and although more recent research has challenged and to some extent overtaken it, it remains a classic in its field.