Dangers of the Night: The Witch, the Devil, and the "Nightmare" in Early Modern England

This article focuses on associations between early modern English witchcraft, demonic activity, temptation and transformation, and the night. It has a particular emphasis on "nightmare" encounters, a term used here not in the modern sense of a bad dream but in the premodern sense of a physical assault by a supernatural being. In most early modern nightmare encounters, victims reported that it was either the Devil or, more commonly, a witch assaulting them in the night. However, in stories of accused witches reporting nightmare encounters, we see a distinctly different belief: that devils could lie on potential witches as part of a process of demonic temptation and transformation. In this article I will argue that these nightmare encounters represented a physical manifestation of an internal struggle against Satan. In doing so I will revisit and reinterpret current scholarship on the nightmare and reinforce the importance of the demonic in English witchcraft belief.