George Gifford and Puritan witch beliefs.

Abstract

Although the Elizabethan Age has come to be regarded as a golden periiod in English history, an era of high culture and remarkable progress in many aneas of life, it was also marked by a notable increase in superstition, the rapid growth of the "witch mania" which readied its climax in the following century. A sparsity of records from earlier periods makes comparisons difficult, bint the number of witch indictments and executions seem to have increased ste:adily during Elizabeth's reign. In 1563 a new witch statute was enacted by Parliament, renewing the provisions of an older law repealed at the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Trevor Davies suggested quite plausibly that the increased prosecutions may have been inspired by the Marian exiles returning to England after 1558, men whose rigid Calvinist theology caused them to take a hard view of evil and to propose stern measures for its extirpation and who were acquainted with the vigorous witdi prosecutions already in force on the Continent. Certainly the Puritan mind did manifest interest in such proceedings, and the concurrence of rising Puritanism and renewed witdi prosecutions seems more than coincidental. However, those prosecutions also inspired able criticisms of witch beliefs by two men whose writings provoked some controversy in their own time and perhaps planted the seeds of doubt but do not appear to have had any immediate influence. The most important of the two was Reginald Scot, whose Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) went through a number of editions and was republished several times in later centuries. The other, less well known in his own time and later, was the Essex vicar George Gifford. Gifford approached the witdi question systematically in two works an exposition entitled A Discourse of the Subtle Practices of Devils by Witches (1587) and a fictional work called A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraft (1593, 1603). In the second especially, in the persona of the wise and humane Daniel, who dominates the debate, he formulated the objections to witdi prosecutions that would be familiar in later times but were apparently not obvious to his contemporaries that juries are too impulsive in convicting witdies and ought to adhere to rigid standards of evidence, that the troubled