Hidden among the many treasures of the British Library lurks one of the most significant witchcraft manuscripts to resurface since George Lincoln Burr discovered the manuscript of Cornelius Loos's De vera et falsa magia in Trier's public library in the 1880s. Unlike Loos's radically sceptical treatise, this untitled document – the second half of ms Harleian 2302 – offers a mostly orthodox treatment of witchcraft. In fact, as its editor Eric Pudney amply demonstrates, it was written as a measured response to Reginald Scot's sceptical 1584 Discoverie of witchcraft. It was also never intended to see the light of day, but, as the essentially private ruminations of an English divine, it is all the more valuable for that.

The significance of A defence of witchcraft belief, as Pudney has decided to call his very welcome edition, is therefore two-fold. First of all, the treatise throws important new light on both the genesis and purpose of Scot's famously radical denunciation of the ‘witch-mongers’. Crucially, Pudney demonstrates that the Harleian manuscript was no commentary on the published Discoverie but effectively a private response to an early draft, evidently sent to the anonymous author for comment prior to publication. There was only a very short window, during the early 1580s, in which it could have been written. (In addition to the evidence adduced in the introduction, the mention of Bodin's 1580 Démonomanie provides a further clue. The fact that the anonymous author did not have the time to properly peruse it himself may point to 1581, seemingly also the editor's preferred year of composition.) Pudney also demonstrates that Scot – who is consistently addressed as ‘you’ and even called a friend – also made changes to the text in response to some of the comments, restructured it from a list of ‘reasons’ to a work with books and chapters (without materially changing the original order), and inserted additional material (for instance, concerning the 1582 St Osyth witchcraft trials, about which the manuscript is silent).

Far from being written in a hurry – and in response to Bodin and the St Osyth trials – as scholars have often assumed, The discoverie was thus a long time in the making. The length of the response suggests that Scot must have had a sizable draft in hand by the time that Bodin's Démonomanie appeared. All this adds credence to Simon F. Davies's suggestion that a September 1576 entry in the Stationers’ Register for a planned book entitled ‘A warning against the superstition of wytches and the madnes of magicians’ refers to an earlier version of the Discoverie (shelved perhaps because Scot kept on encountering new material and new witch-hunts).

This longer runway also brings into greater relief Scot's considerable debt to Johannes Wier's (or Weyer's) 1563 De praestigiis daemonum, which may even have been the original inspiration for Scot's treatise. Yet the anonymous divine's response to the draft Discoverie – as well as the fact that Scot solicited his advice – also highlights the extent to which it was not really the rationalist, proto-scientific defence of witches that scholars once wanted it to be but rather a work of highly idiosyncratic biblical exegesis by an amateur theologian. The manuscript shows how even a friendly critic found Scot's re-interpretations of biblical passages involving witches, spirits, prophecies and miracles far-fetched (because they are). Other passages question Scot's use of misogyny – his mocking depiction of witches as only ‘old silly women’ – to discredit witchcraft belief, and they call out his at times empty rhetorical pyrotechnics: ‘you only say [that ancient Roman law makers were mistaken] but do not prove the same’.

Secondly, while the manuscript offers important new insights into Scot's sceptical treatise, it is also significant as a sustained rumination on witchcraft by a late sixteenth-century clergyman whose interest in the subject was limited. This manuscript was written as a favour to a friend; there is even mention of ‘a wager of a gallon of wine’ which the two men would presumably drink together whatever the outcome. The author describes himself ‘as little … travelled’ in demonology, which perhaps explains why Scot's searing denunciations of the ‘witch-mongers’ did not touch him. Strikingly the author was sceptical of some of the more elaborate aspects of early modern witchcraft theory, particularly sex with the devil. And yet he defended the existence of witches and he even – perhaps from professional experience – recalled admonishing ‘subtle, crafty, and crabbed queans’ to reform their witchy ways, although they always continued ‘in their old trade’. The author's intimate familiarity with Scripture and his frequent discussion of the works of leading Protestant theologians (especially Calvin) mean that he really must have been a clergyman. His evidently close personal relationship with the Kentish sceptic as well as his account of examining an emotionally distressed woman from Kennington (Kent) who confessed to adultery and recovered her health after a public penance places him in England's famous Garden. Although he cannot definitively prove it, Pudney suspects Richard Rogers, suffragan bishop of Dover, to have been the author, and he may well be right, as Rogers was also the rector of Great Chart, a village not even four miles from Kennington.

Our clergyman's defence of witchcraft beliefs thus also matters because he was not overly committed to them, or at least not enough to seek to defend them in print. Witches had to be real because spirits were, but their eradication did not appear urgent. Unlike other English authors, such as George Gifford and (pace Pudney) William Perkins, the author had no difficulty reconciling divine providence and demonic agency. The resilience and success of witchcraft belief, at least at the elite level, are also laid bare. The importance of inversion and contrariety, famously emphasised by Stuart Clark, is in evidence even in demonology's amateur league: ‘As God and the devil are most contrary, so are their actions and doings most contrary.’ Yet the science of demons also successfully claimed the middle ground, and the author, like many published authors, preferred to steer a course between two extremes, in his case the credulity of the ‘fabulous and papistical writers’ and the radical scepticism of his friend. Scot's self-conscious positioning of himself as a solitary voice in the wilderness was self-defeating when pitted against the apparent consensus of all ages, as his friend repeatedly made clear: ‘you alone are of that opinion against all others that ever I have read’.

This publication, in sum, throws important new light on Reginald Scot's Discoverie of witchcraft, a seminal text in the early modern witchcraft debate, and yet the views of the anonymous author are also clearly important in their own right. Even though we have (mostly) moved on from seeing demonology as a battleground between believers and sceptics, it remains tempting to present believers as straightforward defenders of orthodoxy. The present treatise, with its caveated defence of witchcraft, brings out more clearly the versatility of such beliefs. Its publication therefore marks a highly significant contribution to scholarship. Eric Pudney deserves nothing but praise and gratitude for his excellent editorial work, demonstrating this manuscript's complex interaction with Scot's Discoverie and illuminating the origins of both texts. We are very much in his debt.