ABSTRACT
By considering the histories and provenances of the copies of Stearne’s Confirmation, this chapter discusses the transmission, ownership, reception, and collection of Stearne’s text by antiquarians and scholars during the modern period, and will adumbrate the intellectual and cultural shifts which rescued witchcraft studies and A confirmation from the peripheries of academic discourse. It demonstrates that although Stearne’s work had a limited impact when it was published, in the following centuries it was collected by antiquarians, theologians, and historians of witchcraft who recognised its rarity. It is difficult to trace the transmission of A confirmation from 1648 to the present day. John Ferguson was another academic who collected two copies of Stearne’s Confirmation during his lifetime, and they are now held within the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections. The provenance of the two copies held in the British Library and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, is harder to trace. In 1830, Sir Walter Scott published his Letters on demonology and witchcraft.
