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noortjenoelle's review against another edition
dark
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
arthurbdd's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting insight into how contemporaries of the Renaissance-era witch-hunts expressed scepticism about the claims of the witch-hunters.
tompants's review against another edition
4.0
The most entertaining and well-constructed argument I've ever read in a primary source. If you're interested in witchcraft at all, this is essential.
elzbethmrgn's review against another edition
3.0
Sadly, this is the version Montague Summers got his hands on, and so it isn't the full, original text. But, for a readable and quick-reference-able version, it's perfectly fine.
brynhammond's review against another edition
5.0
Reginald Scot drew up his own will in his handwriting and ended it: Great is the trouble my poor wife hath had with me, and small is the comfort she hath received at my hands, whom if I had not matched withal I had not died worth one groat.
I read that his publisher probably urged him to include the material on the conjuring arts in his book, as the only likely commercial content. Scot was a gentleman-amateur writer, and why he took upon himself to combat the demonologists with this piece of work we don't know, further than what he says himself: he is greatly bothered to have seen in his home county of Kent the impoverished and vulnerable fall afoul of those abeyances of usual judicial procedure that were the witch trials. Scot argues against prosecution in any instance: these were impossible crimes in the first place, there is much 'absurdity' in the great witch-scare -- for which the intellectual demonologists are as responsible as the superstitions our nurses teach us; and legal safeguards have been laid aside in the crisis, a non-existent crisis for Scot.
He uses the sceptic's weapons of wit, sarcasm, pun and your standard anti-Catholic joke (however, let us not forget, he is concerned with the onset of the witch-scare in Protestant England). He also deploys compassion as a goal and as a strategy.
His explanations for witchcraft are psychological and social: he rests on melancholy, that catch-term which covered the mentally ill, the mentally disturbed; he is interesting to read for both or either his study of social vulnerability and for the way symptoms of mental illness were then interpreted and understood.
I read that his publisher probably urged him to include the material on the conjuring arts in his book, as the only likely commercial content. Scot was a gentleman-amateur writer, and why he took upon himself to combat the demonologists with this piece of work we don't know, further than what he says himself: he is greatly bothered to have seen in his home county of Kent the impoverished and vulnerable fall afoul of those abeyances of usual judicial procedure that were the witch trials. Scot argues against prosecution in any instance: these were impossible crimes in the first place, there is much 'absurdity' in the great witch-scare -- for which the intellectual demonologists are as responsible as the superstitions our nurses teach us; and legal safeguards have been laid aside in the crisis, a non-existent crisis for Scot.
He uses the sceptic's weapons of wit, sarcasm, pun and your standard anti-Catholic joke (however, let us not forget, he is concerned with the onset of the witch-scare in Protestant England). He also deploys compassion as a goal and as a strategy.
His explanations for witchcraft are psychological and social: he rests on melancholy, that catch-term which covered the mentally ill, the mentally disturbed; he is interesting to read for both or either his study of social vulnerability and for the way symptoms of mental illness were then interpreted and understood.
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