Witchcraft was a live issue in Scotland during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Trials for witchcraft sometimes became headline news, and news of specific trials also raised general intellectual questions about the nature of witchcraft. Everyone wanted to make sense of the strange magical events that witches were said to take part in, and intellectuals wanted to use witchcraft to contribute to debates about how the world should be understood. This volume collects a number of written narratives about specific trials, and written tracts that discuss witchcraft in a more general or theoretical way. It complements a recent volume, Scottish Witchcraft Trials, also published by the Scottish History Society; that volume collects a number of records of witchcraft trials themselves.

The idea of witchcraft, as a crime involving both magical harm and a pact with the Devil, arose in Europe in the early fifteenth century and spread gradually throughout the Continent during the remainder of the century. In Scotland, there were occasional trials for witchcraft from the late fifteenth century onwards. Witch-hunting became more common after the Reformation; the Scottish parliament passed an act against witchcraft in 1563. Narratives and tracts of the kind collected in the present volume began to be written in the 1590s, a time of national panics over witchcraft. Further such works continued to appear until even local panics began to subside in the 1700s.

INTRODUCING NARRATIVES AND TRACTS

Witchcraft was a shocking and sensational crime, and it attracted wide attention. The period in which witchcraft prosecutions first rose and then declined was also the period in which news media, especially printing, developed and became more sophisticated.