The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Superstitions of Witchcraft, by Howard
Williams

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Title: The Superstitions of Witchcraft

Author: Howard Williams

Release Date: October 1, 2007 [eBook #22822]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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Transcriber's notes

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SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT.

London
Printed by Spottiswoode and Co.
New-Street Square

THE SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT.

by

HOWARD WILLIAMS, M.A.

St. John's College, Cambridge.

'Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala rides?'

London:
Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green.
1865.

PREFACE.

'THE SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT' is designed to exhibit a
consecutive review of the characteristic forms and facts of a
creed which (if at present apparently dead, or at least harmless,
in Christendom) in the seventeenth century was a living and
lively faith, and caused thousands of victims to be sent to the
torture-chamber, to the stake, and to the scaffold. At this day,
the remembrance of its superhuman art, in its different
manifestations, is immortalised in the every-day language of the
peoples of Europe.

* * * * *

The belief in Witchcraft is, indeed, in its full development and
most fearful results, modern still more than mediaeval, Christian
still more than Pagan, and Protestant not less than Catholic.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

The Origin, Prevalence, and Variety of Superstition--The
Belief in Witchcraft the most horrid Form of
Superstition--Most flourishing in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries--The Sentiments of Addison,
Blackstone, and the Lawyers of the Eighteenth Century
upon the Su