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Potts has been described as an "active and selective reporter"; [8] he omits significant details of court procedure in the early 17th-century English legal process, such as that all indictments were initially submitted to a grand jury, whose task was to decide whether there was a prima facie case against the accused before the prisoners were taken into the courtroom to be tried by the petty ...
Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition. [14] Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility ...
Thomas Ady (fl. 17th century) was an English physician and humanist who was the author of two sceptical books on witchcraft and witch-hunting. His first and best known work, A Candle in the Dark: Or, A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches & Witchcraft , [ 1 ] was used unsuccessfully by George Burroughs , formerly the Puritan minister of ...
Potts devotes several pages to a fairly detailed criticism of the evidence presented in Grace Sowerbutts' statement, giving an insight into the discrepancies that existed during the early 17th century between the Protestant establishment's view of witchcraft and the beliefs of the common people, who may have been influenced by the more ...
Titled "The Book of Magical Charms," "Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft" and "The Commonplace Book," each of these three texts is handwritten in archaic Latin and English and currently are ...
In England, witch trials were conducted from the 15th century until the 18th century. They are estimated to have resulted in the death of perhaps 500 people, 90 percent of whom were women. The witch hunt was at its most intense stage during the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the Puritan era of the mid-17th century. [1]
According to the Smithsonian, the Newberry Library in Chicago is crowdsourcing translations for three 1 century manuscripts dealing with charms, spirits and other manners of magical practice.
A Trial of Witches A Seventeenth –century Witchcraft Prosecution. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-17109-0. Notestein, Wallace (1911). A History of Witchcraft In England from 1558 to 1718. Whitefish Montana: Kessinger Publishing Co 2003. ISBN 978-0-7661-7918-9. Robbins, Rossell Hope (1959). The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and ...