ABSTRACT
In the celebrated opening of The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), the Kentishgentleman Reginald Scot declared that ‘fables of witchcraft’ had taken ‘fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man’. These fables and ‘wonderfull tales’ were a matter of national and international concern.1 As the first English author of a major treatise on the subject, Scot was inspired by allegations of harmful magic in his locality in the early 1580s, but his intervention belonged to a much wider interest in witchcraft in the second half of the sixteenth century. The English Witchcraft Act of 1563 was paralleled by similar legislation in Scotland, the Spanish Nether - lands and some German principalities in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, and coincided with a new wave of major publications on the subject. It was against this background that Scot, a profoundly sceptical thinker, observed that ‘the world is now so bewitched and over-run with this fond error’.2
