The Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Witchcraft in England from
1558 to 1718, by Wallace Notestein

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Title: A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718

Author: Wallace Notestein

Release Date: March 5, 2010 [EBook #31511]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PRIZE ESSAYS
OF THE
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

1909

To this Essay was awarded the
Herbert Baxter Adams Prize
in European History
for 1909

A HISTORY
OF
WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND
FROM 1558 TO 1718

BY
WALLACE NOTESTEIN
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

PUBLISHED BY
THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, 1911

COPYRIGHT, 1911
BY THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, D.C.

THE LORD BALTIMORE PRESS
BALTIMORE, M.D., U.S.A.

PREFACE.

In its original form this essay was the dissertation submitted for a
doctorate in philosophy conferred by Yale University in 1908. When first
projected it was the writer's purpose to take up the subject of English
witchcraft under certain general political and social aspects. It was
not long, however, before he began to feel that preliminary to such a
treatment there was necessary a chronological survey of the witch
trials. Those strange and tragic affairs were so closely involved with
the politics, literature, and life of the seventeenth century that one
is surprised to find how few of them have received accurate or complete
record in history. It may be said, in fact, that few subjects have
gathered about themselves so large concretions of misinformation as
English witchcraft. This is largely, of course, because so little
attention has been given to it by serious students of history. The
mistakes and misunderstandings of contemporary writers and of the local
historians have been handed down from county history to county history
until many of them have crept into general works. For this reason it was
determined to attempt a chronologica