Show Notes
What did the scholars who studied witchcraft most seriously actually believe? And why did their conclusions so often cut against prosecution?
Professor Darren Oldridge of the University of Worcester joins Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack to examine the intellectual world that produced English demonology and shaped witch trials on both sides of the Atlantic.
In this episode:
- Why the “good witch” was considered more dangerous than the harmful one
- Why the devil mattered far more than witches to learned English Protestants
- The demonological writers whose work traveled directly to colonial New England
- What Reginald Scott and George Gifford argued, and why it surprised their contemporaries
- The specific figure whose writing brought popular and learned ideas into dangerous alignment
- Why the demonic pact was central to prosecution and nearly impossible to prove
- What the Massachusetts law code of the 1640s reveals about biblical influence on colonial legal thinking
- How Increase Mather’s skepticism at Salem connected to a century of English Protestant thought
Links
- Professor Darren Oldridge
- Buy Books by Darren Oldridge
- Learn more at endwitchhunts.org and aboutwitchhunts.com
- Sign the Boston Exoneration Petition
- We’re on Youtube too!
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