The Scottish Witchcraft Act

Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials

This paper re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with “elf-shot.” Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationship of these beliefs to witchcraft itself.

Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft

Witchcraft or mycotoxin? The Salem witch trials.

BACKGROUND The Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 have been studied by many historians looking for the complex social, political, and psychological determinants behind the community-wide hysteria that led to a travesty of justice and the deaths of 20 innocent Puritans. Recently, ergot poisoning has been put forth by some as a previously unsuspected cause of the bizarre behaviors of the young adole...

Salem possessed. The social origins of witchcraft

PAUL BOYER and STEPHEN NISSENBAUM, Salem possessed. The social origins of witchcraft, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974, 8vo, pp. xxi, 231, illus., $10.00. Reviewed by Edwin Clarke, M.D., F.R.C.P., Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NW] 2BP. Of all the outbreaks of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, that at Salem Village, Massachusetts, in...

The physician and witchcraft in restoration England.

THE YEAR of 1660 witnessed important political and scientific developments in England. The restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England occurred with the return of Charles II after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the Puritan influence. The Royal Society, after informal meetings for nearly fifteen years, was established as a scientific organization in 1660 and received its Royal...