Selected Witch Readings, and the Shelf That Corrects Them

The load-bearing eight

Eight filings carry the rest: four of prosecution paperwork, the rebuttal that got into print first, a public apology, and two works of fiction. Read these and the other eighty-four stop being surprising.

1. Malleus Maleficarum Heinrich Kramer · 1486

   The procedure manual the whole file descends from, and a handbook addressed to the men conducting the examinations. Exact about method and worthless about fact, and cited by this register for one mechanism and for nothing else at all.

2. The Discoverie of Witchcraft Reginald Scot · 1584

   The first debunking, in English, in print, before most of the prosecutions this register files. It does not stop at doubting: it explains the tricks, so that a reader can do them and see for himself. The register's own method, four centuries early.

3. Daemonologie James VI of Scotland · 1597

   A reigning monarch's rebuttal of the 1584 filing. The most consequential piece of literary criticism in the collection, on the grounds that the reviewer had courts.

4. The Discovery of Witches Matthew Hopkins · 1647

   A witchfinder's account of his own practice, and the only document on the register that lists the familiars by name and species. The register takes the list, which is a list of small animals, and takes nothing from the pamphlet about the people it was used against.

5. The records of the Court of Oyer and Terminer Court of Oyer and Terminer · 1692

   The most precise paperwork on the register and the worst thing on it. Nineteen hanged, one man pressed to death under weights, none burned. Read it for the procedure. The register will not summarise what the examinations were said to contain, because all of it reaches anyone only through the proceeding those counts record.

6. The public apology of Samuel Sewall Samuel Sewall · 1697

   The register's only retraction in five centuries: a public apology, read out, taking the blame. What it repairs, and what it does not, is argued on the register.

7. Macbeth William Shakespeare · 1606

   Dated about 1606 and first printed in 1623. The register's first printed ingredient list, and the origin of every cauldron filed since. Read as a recipe rather than as a curse it is batch cooking by three people to a stated order of operations, which is what a large vessel usually means.

8. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum · 1900

   Where the water comes from, and it comes from nowhere else. One of the two universally known facts about witches enters the record on this card; the other arrives thirty-nine years later from the same property, in colour.

The shelf

Every factual claim this register makes about what the accusations were made of rests on the books below. Two entries carry a caveat saying nobody here has read them.

• Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England Alan Macfarlane · 1970

  The Essex assize records, worked through case by case. Half of the register's leading finding rests on this book: the accusation typically follows a request refused at a door, and the accuser is usually the party who did the refusing.

• Religion and the Decline of Magic Keith Thomas · 1971

  The other half. The charity-refused model set in the whole context of what English households believed and did about misfortune.

• Salem Possessed Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum · 1974

  The property line through Salem Village, drawn on a map, with the accusations sorting along it. The single most quoted piece of evidence for the register's butter finding.

• In the Devil's Snare Mary Beth Norton · 2002

  The frontier-war reading, and the standing corrective to the book above it.

• Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt edited by Bernard Rosenthal · 2009

  The court papers themselves, edited and in one place. This is where the counts on the 1692 card come from.

• Witchfinders Malcolm Gaskill · 2005

  Hopkins and the East Anglian trials, told from outside the practice. Read alongside the 1647 pamphlet on this page, which is the same enterprise described by the man conducting it.

• The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe Brian Levack · 1987, 4th edition 2016

  Where the register's burning finding gets its limits. The numbers and the methods of execution, by jurisdiction.

• Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany Lyndal Roper · 2004

  Germany. The register cites it for the scale of what happened there, which is not something this page can carry from its own English and New England material.

• The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present Ronald Hutton · 2017

  The long view, across cultures, by somebody unusually careful about what the evidence will and will not carry. The corrective to any sentence beginning "witches have always".

• The Triumph of the Moon Ronald Hutton · 1999

  The history of modern pagan witchcraft, and the reason the register files its 1954 card as a boundary marker rather than as a continuation of anything.

  Read it to keep the trial-era figure and the modern religion apart. This register grades only the first.

• The Witch in History Diane Purkiss · 1996

  The figure as it appears in the fiction, which is what most of this register actually consists of. Useful for seeing how much of the popular image was assembled after the trials and by people with no interest in them.

• Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials Marion Gibson · 2023

  Thirteen cases, told properly, including several outside the English and New England material this register leans on. The most readable way in.

  Popular-scholarly. Use it to find the cases; go to the edited records for the counts.

• The Witches: Salem, 1692 Stacy Schiff · 2015

  Narrative, sourced, and very good on the texture of the place and the year.

  Popular. Where it and the edited court papers differ, the papers are the filing to cite, and they are on this page.

• The Discoverie of Witchcraft Reginald Scot · 1584

  Primary, and also a card on this register. On the shelf as well, so a reader can check that the rebuttal came first.

• The Making of The Wizard of Oz Aljean Harmetz · 1977

  The standard production history, and the usual source given for why the 1939 filing made its witch green.

  Nobody here has read it. The green-skin explanation on the 1939 card is recorded as an attribution to this book and is not printed as fact until somebody here has opened it.

• Le Champion des Dames Martin Le Franc · 1451

  The manuscript usually cited as carrying the earliest depiction of a witch on a broom, in a marginal illustration.

  Unverified. I have seen the attribution repeated, and nobody here has checked it against the manuscript, so the broom finding on this register prints no date at all.