ABSTRACT

Our examination of what might be termed elite perspectives on witchcraft has, therefore, revealed a complex situation: there were a variety of theological emphases; there was the approach to witchcraft as set out in the law; there were the ways, perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the classical learning and in the drama of the period, in which witchcraft operated in the more general culture; and there was also the relationship, via the pervasive influence of magic and the occult on educated thinking, between witchcraft and medicine and what modern terminology would describe as science. Witchcraft was, however, clearly also a matter of some concern to the bulk of the population who were non-elite, not educated to the best standards of the period, and illiterate or, at best, semi-literate. The beliefs of these people are less well documented than those of their social superiors. We must reconstruct what they thought from scattered shards of evidence rather than from weighty treatises, while most of those shards of evidence which do survive were written by members of the elite who were rarely concerned to record the views of the populace at large comprehensively or in a favourable light. Trial records and other forms of court documentation fall into this category, as do the usually hostile comments on popular superstitions which can be found in both demonological works and in sceptical tracts.