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Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland
This book is a collection of essays on Scottish witchcraft. Unlike most such works, it concentrates on witchcraft beliefs rather than witch-hunting. It ranges widely across areas of popular belief, culture, and ritual practice, as well as dealing with intellectual life and incorporating regional and comparative elements. The editors were members of the team responsible for the recently-completed Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, and the book incorporates a number of pioneering findings from this rich online resource.
277 pages, Hardcover
First published December 4, 2007
197 people want to read
About the author
Julian Goodare
19 books6 followersJulian Goodare is a Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (1999) and The Government of Scotland, 1560 - 1625 (2004). His edited books include The Reign of James VI (2000) (co-edited with Michael Lynch) and Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (2008) (co-edited with Alasdair A. MacDonald).
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December 16, 2025
“Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland” is the kind of book that refuses to flatter its reader. It is not written to intoxicate you with spectacle, nor to relieve you with the comfort of moral distance. Instead it performs a more exacting task: it reconstructs the Scottish witch-hunt as a knowable historical process, built from ordinary materials – parish discipline, local quarrels, legal forms, theological premises – and it asks us to take seriously the fact that, in its own time, this process could feel not only plausible but responsible.
The book’s greatest strength is its steadiness of method. It does not treat “witchcraft” as a free-floating superstition that occasionally erupts into violence. It treats it as a set of explanations, institutions, and practices that interlock. That choice has stylistic consequences. The prose tends toward the lucid, the sober, the carefully qualified. It is less interested in the performance of horror than in the mechanics that make horror administrable. When the book gives you a trial, it is not as a gothic set piece. It is as evidence – and, often, as a warning about what evidence is. Confessions are not transparent windows. They are pressured narratives. Depositions do not speak in the accused person’s voice alone. They speak in the voice of procedure, of expectation, of men trained to recognize certain crimes in certain forms.
At the outset, the authors establish a world in which the Devil is not a metaphor and misfortune is not random. Early modern Scotland is presented as a culture of interpretation. A sick child, a ruined crop, a cow that fails – these do not simply happen, then fade into private grief. They demand cause. And cause, in a Christian cosmology saturated with providence and spiritual warfare, is rarely purely natural. The book is careful to insist on intelligibility without offering excuse. It does not ask you to admire the period’s certainty. It asks you to understand how certainty could be reached.
From there, the argument turns practical. Scotland’s church courts and civil courts do not hover above popular belief as neutral correctives. They are among its most powerful amplifiers. The kirk’s concern with discipline, speech, and moral order means that certain kinds of people become especially visible. That visibility matters. Witchcraft accusations do not commonly strike strangers. They strike those already entangled in community life: the neighbor with a reputation, the person whose anger is remembered, the woman whose refusal to keep sweet in public becomes, over time, a social problem in search of a name.
One of the book’s most persuasive achievements is its account of how accusation grows from relationship. Witchcraft, in these chapters, is not a private occult practice. It is a social language for explaining conflict and misfortune. A refusal of charity is not simply an awkward moment. If misfortune follows, it becomes a key. A quarrel becomes a curse after the fact. And the retrospective logic that binds events together is not portrayed as mere gullibility. It is portrayed as a culturally learned way of making coherence. The book lingers on reputation, not to reduce witchcraft to gossip, but to show how gossip can become evidentiary. Once the community begins to speak in a certain register – once the “known witch” exists as a social fact – formal prosecution can look like a natural next step.
That “next step” is where Scotland’s institutions come fully into view. The book’s chapters on courts and procedure are quietly devastating, because they make clear how little is needed for the system to move. Witchcraft is difficult to prove through material evidence, so the system leans heavily on confession. Confession becomes the hinge on which the whole prosecution turns. And the conditions that produce confession are described with a controlled frankness that is more chilling than outrage: isolation, repeated examination, sleep deprivation, the slow erosion of resistance, the insistence that denial is itself a form of guilt. What emerges is a portrait of a legal culture that can treat coercion as ordinary, because it is performed in the name of truth.
Here the book is at its best when it shows how confessions take shape. They are not random. They are patterned. They follow a script that includes diabolical encounter, pact, meetings, maleficium, names. The accused learn, often quickly, what kind of story is required of them. A confession becomes less a disclosure than an accommodation – not necessarily calculated, but pressured into being. The book avoids the lazy comfort of declaring all such narratives false and moving on. It recognizes that human beings under strain will reach for whatever coherence is available. A confessional script can become a lifeline even when it is a death sentence.
Demonology, too, is treated with seriousness. The authors do not drape it in scorn. They treat it as a learned framework that supplies order to fear and coherence to evidence. The Devil is not simply a figure of belief; he becomes a judicial actor. He makes certain accusations legible. He allows courts to interpret contradictions not as reasons for doubt but as proofs of deceit. In this book’s account, demonological thinking is not marginal. It is one of the ways the state and church organize reality.
The case study of the North Berwick trials, one of the book’s pivotal moments, demonstrates what happens when these elements align under political stress. Here witchcraft is not merely local, not merely neighborly. It becomes national. It becomes a language for treason and threat, a story that can attach itself to storms and failed voyages and royal anxiety. The significance of North Berwick in the book is not simply that it is dramatic. It is that it provides a clear view of escalation. Once witchcraft is framed as conspiracy, the logic of the hunt changes. The circle of suspicion expands; each confession generates new suspects; the imagination of diabolical organization becomes self-feeding. The system discovers, in its own procedures, a way to keep going.
A later chapter widens the lens again, mapping chronology and geography in a way that resists the lazy idea of a single “witch craze.” The book’s picture is uneven and episodic: clusters, surges, and falls, shaped by local initiative and institutional activation as much as by hardship or collective emotion. This is one of the book’s strongest correctives to popular myth. If witch-hunting were only a matter of belief, one might expect a steadier distribution. Instead, the book shows how crucial particular ministers, magistrates, and local authorities could be. Where energetic officials pursued cases and knew how to translate accusation into procedure, prosecutions flourished. Where they did not, the same cultural beliefs could persist without producing the same lethal outcomes.
The chapter on skepticism and decline is similarly resistant to consolation. Witch-hunting does not end because reason arrives, sweeping superstition aside. It wanes because constraints harden: central authorities become more cautious, evidentiary standards tighten, procedural fatigue sets in, and the confessional machine begins to look less like truth and more like its own kind of danger. The point is not that Scotland becomes enlightened. The point is that systems shift, often for pragmatic reasons, and that restraint can emerge from within belief rather than against it.
Toward the end, the book becomes more explicitly reflective about how the witch-hunt has been represented – and misrepresented – in later narratives. The authors are alert to the way “witchcraft” can be turned into a morality play: the past as darkness, the present as clarity. They resist this not because they wish to moralize less, but because they wish to moralize more responsibly. If you treat witch-hunting as an eruption of primitive irrationality, you absolve institutions. You also miss the book’s deeper lesson: that persecution becomes most dangerous when it is coherent, procedural, and endorsed by authority.
The final chapter’s insistence on methodological caution – especially around numbers – is bracing. It refuses both inflation and minimization. It distinguishes accusation from trial, trial from conviction, conviction from execution. It reminds the reader that archives do not preserve suffering evenly. The very patchiness of evidence is part of the historical reality: a record of what authorities cared to record, and of what has survived by chance. There is a valuable discipline in this restraint. It keeps the subject from becoming a set of easy statistics or a contest of horror.
If there is a limitation, it is the one that often accompanies such disciplined work. The book’s prose, by design, rarely allows itself rhetorical heat. Its moral intelligence is present, but it is expressed through structure rather than flourish. At times, a reader may wish for more modulation – not sensationalism, not a descent into luridness, but a sharper acknowledgement of the human cost that these procedures inflict. The victims can sometimes recede behind the analysis of systems. The book’s virtue is that it will not turn suffering into aesthetic. Its risk is that the very refusal to aestheticize can create a tone of controlled distance.
But that distance is also part of what makes the book valuable. “Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland” teaches you how to read witchcraft prosecutions without being seduced by their narratives, and how to understand belief without caricature. It insists that the lethal force of witch-hunting lies not in the strangeness of the past, but in the ordinary alignment of community grievance, institutional authority, and a legal culture hungry for confession. It is, in other words, a book about how violence can be made to look like order.
My rating for “Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland” is 75 out of 100: a rigorous, deeply useful study whose clarity and restraint are its strengths, even if that same restraint occasionally narrows the emotional range a reader might hope for in a work that deals, ultimately, with sanctioned death and the terrible ease with which explanation becomes punishment.
The book’s greatest strength is its steadiness of method. It does not treat “witchcraft” as a free-floating superstition that occasionally erupts into violence. It treats it as a set of explanations, institutions, and practices that interlock. That choice has stylistic consequences. The prose tends toward the lucid, the sober, the carefully qualified. It is less interested in the performance of horror than in the mechanics that make horror administrable. When the book gives you a trial, it is not as a gothic set piece. It is as evidence – and, often, as a warning about what evidence is. Confessions are not transparent windows. They are pressured narratives. Depositions do not speak in the accused person’s voice alone. They speak in the voice of procedure, of expectation, of men trained to recognize certain crimes in certain forms.
At the outset, the authors establish a world in which the Devil is not a metaphor and misfortune is not random. Early modern Scotland is presented as a culture of interpretation. A sick child, a ruined crop, a cow that fails – these do not simply happen, then fade into private grief. They demand cause. And cause, in a Christian cosmology saturated with providence and spiritual warfare, is rarely purely natural. The book is careful to insist on intelligibility without offering excuse. It does not ask you to admire the period’s certainty. It asks you to understand how certainty could be reached.
From there, the argument turns practical. Scotland’s church courts and civil courts do not hover above popular belief as neutral correctives. They are among its most powerful amplifiers. The kirk’s concern with discipline, speech, and moral order means that certain kinds of people become especially visible. That visibility matters. Witchcraft accusations do not commonly strike strangers. They strike those already entangled in community life: the neighbor with a reputation, the person whose anger is remembered, the woman whose refusal to keep sweet in public becomes, over time, a social problem in search of a name.
One of the book’s most persuasive achievements is its account of how accusation grows from relationship. Witchcraft, in these chapters, is not a private occult practice. It is a social language for explaining conflict and misfortune. A refusal of charity is not simply an awkward moment. If misfortune follows, it becomes a key. A quarrel becomes a curse after the fact. And the retrospective logic that binds events together is not portrayed as mere gullibility. It is portrayed as a culturally learned way of making coherence. The book lingers on reputation, not to reduce witchcraft to gossip, but to show how gossip can become evidentiary. Once the community begins to speak in a certain register – once the “known witch” exists as a social fact – formal prosecution can look like a natural next step.
That “next step” is where Scotland’s institutions come fully into view. The book’s chapters on courts and procedure are quietly devastating, because they make clear how little is needed for the system to move. Witchcraft is difficult to prove through material evidence, so the system leans heavily on confession. Confession becomes the hinge on which the whole prosecution turns. And the conditions that produce confession are described with a controlled frankness that is more chilling than outrage: isolation, repeated examination, sleep deprivation, the slow erosion of resistance, the insistence that denial is itself a form of guilt. What emerges is a portrait of a legal culture that can treat coercion as ordinary, because it is performed in the name of truth.
Here the book is at its best when it shows how confessions take shape. They are not random. They are patterned. They follow a script that includes diabolical encounter, pact, meetings, maleficium, names. The accused learn, often quickly, what kind of story is required of them. A confession becomes less a disclosure than an accommodation – not necessarily calculated, but pressured into being. The book avoids the lazy comfort of declaring all such narratives false and moving on. It recognizes that human beings under strain will reach for whatever coherence is available. A confessional script can become a lifeline even when it is a death sentence.
Demonology, too, is treated with seriousness. The authors do not drape it in scorn. They treat it as a learned framework that supplies order to fear and coherence to evidence. The Devil is not simply a figure of belief; he becomes a judicial actor. He makes certain accusations legible. He allows courts to interpret contradictions not as reasons for doubt but as proofs of deceit. In this book’s account, demonological thinking is not marginal. It is one of the ways the state and church organize reality.
The case study of the North Berwick trials, one of the book’s pivotal moments, demonstrates what happens when these elements align under political stress. Here witchcraft is not merely local, not merely neighborly. It becomes national. It becomes a language for treason and threat, a story that can attach itself to storms and failed voyages and royal anxiety. The significance of North Berwick in the book is not simply that it is dramatic. It is that it provides a clear view of escalation. Once witchcraft is framed as conspiracy, the logic of the hunt changes. The circle of suspicion expands; each confession generates new suspects; the imagination of diabolical organization becomes self-feeding. The system discovers, in its own procedures, a way to keep going.
A later chapter widens the lens again, mapping chronology and geography in a way that resists the lazy idea of a single “witch craze.” The book’s picture is uneven and episodic: clusters, surges, and falls, shaped by local initiative and institutional activation as much as by hardship or collective emotion. This is one of the book’s strongest correctives to popular myth. If witch-hunting were only a matter of belief, one might expect a steadier distribution. Instead, the book shows how crucial particular ministers, magistrates, and local authorities could be. Where energetic officials pursued cases and knew how to translate accusation into procedure, prosecutions flourished. Where they did not, the same cultural beliefs could persist without producing the same lethal outcomes.
The chapter on skepticism and decline is similarly resistant to consolation. Witch-hunting does not end because reason arrives, sweeping superstition aside. It wanes because constraints harden: central authorities become more cautious, evidentiary standards tighten, procedural fatigue sets in, and the confessional machine begins to look less like truth and more like its own kind of danger. The point is not that Scotland becomes enlightened. The point is that systems shift, often for pragmatic reasons, and that restraint can emerge from within belief rather than against it.
Toward the end, the book becomes more explicitly reflective about how the witch-hunt has been represented – and misrepresented – in later narratives. The authors are alert to the way “witchcraft” can be turned into a morality play: the past as darkness, the present as clarity. They resist this not because they wish to moralize less, but because they wish to moralize more responsibly. If you treat witch-hunting as an eruption of primitive irrationality, you absolve institutions. You also miss the book’s deeper lesson: that persecution becomes most dangerous when it is coherent, procedural, and endorsed by authority.
The final chapter’s insistence on methodological caution – especially around numbers – is bracing. It refuses both inflation and minimization. It distinguishes accusation from trial, trial from conviction, conviction from execution. It reminds the reader that archives do not preserve suffering evenly. The very patchiness of evidence is part of the historical reality: a record of what authorities cared to record, and of what has survived by chance. There is a valuable discipline in this restraint. It keeps the subject from becoming a set of easy statistics or a contest of horror.
If there is a limitation, it is the one that often accompanies such disciplined work. The book’s prose, by design, rarely allows itself rhetorical heat. Its moral intelligence is present, but it is expressed through structure rather than flourish. At times, a reader may wish for more modulation – not sensationalism, not a descent into luridness, but a sharper acknowledgement of the human cost that these procedures inflict. The victims can sometimes recede behind the analysis of systems. The book’s virtue is that it will not turn suffering into aesthetic. Its risk is that the very refusal to aestheticize can create a tone of controlled distance.
But that distance is also part of what makes the book valuable. “Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland” teaches you how to read witchcraft prosecutions without being seduced by their narratives, and how to understand belief without caricature. It insists that the lethal force of witch-hunting lies not in the strangeness of the past, but in the ordinary alignment of community grievance, institutional authority, and a legal culture hungry for confession. It is, in other words, a book about how violence can be made to look like order.
My rating for “Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland” is 75 out of 100: a rigorous, deeply useful study whose clarity and restraint are its strengths, even if that same restraint occasionally narrows the emotional range a reader might hope for in a work that deals, ultimately, with sanctioned death and the terrible ease with which explanation becomes punishment.
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