ABSTRACT
If beliefs in witchcraft, or something very like it, have been found in most known societies, they have certainly been present in Europe since antiquity.. What was different in Europe between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries was that the witch was regarded not as an isolated magical practitioner, but rather as a member of an anti-Christian sect, a being eager to overturn the moral and physical universe of God, Christian believer, and Christian ruler alike. Something of the flavour of this conception of the witch was conveyed by the great English theologian William Perkins (1558-1602), glossing the frequently discussed biblical text I Samuel XV.23, 'For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft':
It was this ability on the part of contemporaries to see the witch as a general enemy, as the foe both of the king's laws and those of God, which allows us to talk of 'witch-hunts' or of the 'European witch-craze'.
In England, witchcraft and witch-trials prior to the mid-sixteenth century remain obscure and ill-documented subjects. Most English monarchs from Richard II onwards, like their counterparts in other European states, found themselves confronted by what might be termed treason-cum-sorcery plots [123], in which those planning the downfall of the monarch sought magical assistance (suspicions of witchcraft, to take a familiar example, were present during the trial of Anne Boleyn in 1536). On a less exalted social level, occasional references to witches can be found in both ecclesiastical and secular court records. These involved accusations against harmful witches and cunning folk, while it seems that many of the practices associated with witches in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods were already the subject of popular belief by the early sixteenth century, and probably much earlier. But the number of such cases was few, and the English ecclesiastical authorities do not seem to have seen witchcraft as a major problem. Our current state of knowledge suggests that there was no English contribution to the formation of demonological theory, while insofar as witchcraft figured in pre-Reformation tracts it was recourse to cunning folk, rather than the threat posed by harmful witches, which seems to have been seen as the most consistent cause for concern.
