Doubt and demonology: Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft

As a consequence of its comprehensiveness, The Discoverie of Witchcraft was an invaluable source of information on magic, demonology, witchcraft, spirits, divination of many kinds, and legerdemain. The persecution of witches that followed in the wake of the 1563 statute no doubt led Reginald Scot to begin reading the contemporary literature around witchcraft and demonology. Scot’s work was peppered with around fifty marginal references to Jean Bodin’s De La Démonomanie. Scot was aware that the falsity of confessions voluntarily made was a consequence, not only of melancholy, but also of the ideological edifice which they apparently supported—namely, demonology. Scot realised that his account of witchcraft was crucially dependent on demonstrating the feeble foundations upon which demonology was constructed. Scot was never averse to turning demonology against itself and seeking justification for his arguments in Catholic sources