England’s First Demonologist: Reginald Scot and “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” by Philip C. Almond (review)

There was a time when Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) was so misunderstood and ill-treated that modern editions of it could appear—by Montague Summers in 1930 and Hugh Ross Williamson in 1964—that entirely omitted the most important part of the argument. For far too long, the only way of coming to terms with his radical scepticism about witchcraft was to call him a “rationalist” or appeal to the lazy and unhistorical notion that he was born before his time. Things changed after the appearance of The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, which came out in 1977 and has recently been reprinted in the Routledge Library Editions: Witchcraft series. Its editor, Sydney Anglo, wanted to promote a more rigorous and scholarly appraisal of demonology in general but he was also motivated by the desire to get readers to see Scot, in particular, afresh—and, at the very least, to get them to read the whole of his extraordinary book, rather than just a part of it. But although, since then, we have had a string of important individual essays on various aspects of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, there has only been one (rather ineffective) book by Robert H. West. Meanwhile, the intelligibility problem has been reversed. Now that we find the mainstream belief in witchcraft much easier to understand in its context, it is people like Scot who need to be seen initially as puzzling: someone who once seemed to react to witchcraft as we might has to be turned, as it were, into a stranger. Only then can we gauge how alike or how different from his contemporaries he really was.

Philip Almond is well aware of this change of perspective, even if he refers to it only in his closing lines. Avoiding the temptation to look backward at Scot, he concentrates on locating his arguments entirely in his own world and the debates that animated it. This is done by continually moving between accounts of the text itself and references to the episodes and authors mentioned by Scot and to which he was clearly responding. After a chapter dealing with his life and the life of his book, we are taken, largely descriptively, through the main topics of The Discoverie under the headings of “witchcraft,” “demonology,” and “magic,” all the while following the lexicon of Hebrew terms that Scot derived from the Old Testament and from Johann Weyer. Among the themes that dominate are his Calvinism (and anti-Catholicism), biblicism, providentialism, apocalypticism, appeal to natural magic for explanations, and reliance on the doctrine of the cessation of miracles. First-time readers of Scot will find this invaluable as a trustworthy introduction and guide, even if those who already know Scot’s work will feel they are on familiar ground. Unfortunately, some opportunities have been missed. There has been little attempt to say anything new about the reception of The Discoverie, and, despite awareness of Scot’s obvious social conscience, no real accounting for his acute social—one might almost say anthropological—analysis of witchcraft cases. One of the other things about Scot’s writing that cries out for analysis and interpretation is his style, but despite many examples of his acidic sarcasm and his love of both absurdity and ridicule in the quotations included in the study, this is left unexamined. There is also one odd and outdated use of terms, in what is otherwise an admirably accurate and lucid treatment. Scot is credited (ironically, of course) with spreading awareness of something called “Continental”—sometimes “European”—demonology, so called because it dealt with things like the demonic pact, the witches’ sabbath, demonic sex, and animal metamorphosis, all of which were absent from English discussions. But they were largely absent from many “Continental” discussions too, both in particular genres of demonology (like...