Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe Author Faith Tarpley Author Liza Conover Author Tim Regan Supervising Editor Kathryn M. Moncrief Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Faith Tarpley, Liza Conover, and Tim Regan, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Trials Gender Misogyny Women Science Occult Superstition Published page. Updated links to a permalink. proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Liza Conover Liza Conover

Liza Conover was a student at Washington College.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Kathryn M. Moncrief Kathryn Moncrief

Kathryn M. Moncrief is Paris Fletcher Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Head of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, MA. She was previously Professor and Chair of English at Washington College, in Chestertown, MD where she taught courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern literature and culture and received the Washington College Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching. She serves as co-editor of the Shakespeare Life and Times section of the Internet Shakespeare Editions and has published widely on Shakespeare and performance. She is co-editor of Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage and Classroom in Early Modern Drama (with Kathryn McPherson and Sarah Enloe); Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction and Performance; and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (both with Kathryn McPherson). She is the author of articles published in book collections and journals, including Literary Cultures and the Child, Shaping Shakespeare for Performance, Metaliterary in Practice, Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood, and Renaissance Quarterly.

 Tim Regan Tim Regan

Tim Regan was a student at Washington College.

 Faith Tarpley Faith Tarpley

Faith Tarpley was a student at Washington College.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/

The idea that magic and witchcraft had the potential to harm others, combined with strictures in Christianity, spurred the witch hunts that took place from the 14th century to the mid-17th century. Before this time, witchcraft was not considered inherently evil. People in early modern period generally believed that those practicing magic had willingly damned themselves to hell. In England, people also believed that demonic animal familiars accompanied witches and aided them in their practices. Some experts such as Barbara Ehrenreich assert that rather than being implemented by disorganized mobs, witch hunts were calculated operations planned by both the state and church.

Impoverished women were the demographic most commonly executed for practicing witchcraft. That being said, all persons could be accused of witchcraft. Women and, to a significantly lesser extent, men of all social statuses were accused and sentenced to death for practicing witchcraft.

In early modern England, witch trials relied on the confession of witchcraft from the accused. The number of honest confessions cannot be accurately determined, as the accused would commonly be tortured until they provided a confession, which led to their execution. Compared to other European nations, England was relatively moderate in terms of is persecution of witches. Despite witch hunts regularly occuring during the early modern period, those executed for witchcraft in England during this period accounted for approximately 1% of all witches killed in Europe during this time period (Ehrenreich).

Witchcraft and the Marginalized

Approximately 80% of those tried in witch trials were women, most of them marginalized by being single, sick in mind or body, or elderly, all unable to defend themselves. This targeting of women came from their presumed affiliation with and weakness for occult practices, possibly due to Christian beliefs about Eve’s temptation by Satan in Genesis. This association was strengthened by a book Malleus Maleficarum, published in 15th century Germany by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum was one of the first popular publications that directly, negatively connected witchcraft to womanhood, insisting that both are borne from carnal lust and are tied to the devil. Malleus Maleficarum later became a reference tool for witch trials in early modern Europe, popular across the region and published in more than 26 editions in the period.

Some other writers were publicly apprehensive regarding claims of witchcraft, most notably Reginald Scot’s 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Scot argues that those accused of witchcraft were likely marginalized and the supposed acts of witchcraft were misunderstandings or coincidences. In his writings Scot does not deny the existence of witches, but that the acts of witchcraft were instead acts of God. In response to these claims, King James VI of Scotland, who became KingJames I of England in 1603, held public book burnings of Scot’s volume and famously authored his own exploration of witchcraft entitled Daemonologie in 1597.

Key Print Sources Bodin, Jean et al. The Definition of a Witch. On the Demon-mania of Witches. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995, pp. 45–55. Carroll, William C. William Shakespeare, Macbeth: Texts and Contexts. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Feminist, 1973. Gildrie, Richard P., and Carol Karlsen. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. The American Historical Review vol. 94, no. 1, 1989, pp. 211. James I, King of England. Daemonologie. Curwen Press, 1924 1597. Kramer, Heinrich, and Jacob Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Rev. Montague Summers. Pushkin Press, 1951. Monter, E. William. Re-contextualizing British Witchcraft. Journal of Interdisciplinary History vol. 35, no. 1, 2004, pp. 105–111. Newton, John, and Jo Bath. Witchcraft and the Act of 1604. Brill, 2008.
Key Online Sources Best, MichaelWitches.Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Intenet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/the%20supernatural/witches.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Scot, ReginaldThe Discovery of Witchcraft. 1665, Early English Books Online. University of Michigan. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A62397.0001.001.
Image Sources Macbeth, Banquo and the Three Witches, the Historie of Scotlande. 1577. Woodcut, B/w Photo. Bridgeman Images: The Bridgeman Art Library. London: Bridgeman, 2014. Credo Reference.