Notes On Witchcraft

George Lyman Kittredge reframes Salem witchcraft as part of a far larger human history of superstition, not an isolated New England aberration. He argues that belief in witches, spirits, apparitions, and demonic influence was once nearly universal, endorsed by scripture, law, medicine, philosophy, and the most respected minds of the seventeenth century. From Bacon, James I, Browne, Burton, Glanvill, More, Boyle, Barrow, and Hickes to Evelyn and Hale, the evidence shows that witch belief crossed Puritan and non-Puritan worlds alike. Kittredge also traces the limits of early skepticism in Johann Wier and Reginald Scot, whose objections to witchcraft remained entangled with their own supernatural assumptions. Yet witch trials were not driven by doctrine alone: war, disorder, rumor, neighborhood resentment, and local testimony repeatedly turned suspicion into prosecution across Europe and the British Isles. Salem, then, emerges as a product of its age, shaped by the convictions of both elites and ordinary people. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.