INTRODUCTION

The composite manuscript edited below bears many resemblances to the better-known True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girle, published in 1698, which is edited as the subsequent text in the present volume. However, the manuscript also contains revealing differences, of three types. First, it contains additional documents that are not included in the True Narrative – most strikingly, a tract by James Williamson criticising the evidence used in the witchcraft trials. Second, it omits some of the documents published in the True Narrative. Third, there are intriguing differences in some of the documents that are common to both texts. For instance, both texts contain the central narrative of Christian Shaw's demonic possession, but in two noticeably different versions. These differences may reveal much about how the narrative was compiled, and help us to understand the bizarre events that it related. At the end of the edition, a further short document is added as an appendix: a contemporary newsletter relating yet another version of some of these events.

The manuscript: description, date, purpose

The ‘Bargarran Witches’ manuscript, as it is known by its present holders, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, is an untitled foolscap volume in original binding containing the texts of a number of documents relating to the Bargarran witchcraft case. The manuscript was bought in London for the Library by George Neilson, who published one of its documents in 1910 – a sermon by James Hutchison, minister of Kilallan, that he preached in Paisley on 13 April 1697 to the commissioners of justiciary trying the accused witches. Neilson noted internal evidence that the volume had been in the possession of the Shaw of Bargarran family in the eighteenth century, and it seems reasonable