Abstract
The idea of witchcraft has been around for a long time, can be found in many cultures around the world, and has generally been understood to be a supernatural evil. Witches carried out maleficium, known in Scotland as mal-efice, acts of harmful magic. In the late medieval and early modern period, the gradual emergence of diabolical witchcraft, or the notion that witches were actively engaged in Devil worship, changed the nature of the crime from a basic felony to one of heresy and apostasy. The diabolical aspect of much European witchcraft has also been seen as a key distinguishing feature from understandings of witchcraft in most non-Western societies up to the present day.2
… tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf candles, deadlights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery … cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp lookout in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of Philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.
Robert Burns, Letter to John Moore (1787)1
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Notes
Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987; 3rd edn, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2006) 8–9.
Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981) 8–9.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Subsequent researchers on African witch beliefs found that Evans-Pritchard’s dichotomy could not be universally applied, notably Victor W. Turner. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Subsequent researchers on African witch beliefs found that Evans-Pritchard’s dichotomy could not be universally applied, notably Victor W. Turner, “Witchcraft and Sorcery: Taxonomy versus Dynamics,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 34/4 (1964): 314–25.
Gary Ferraro and Susan Andreatta, Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective (Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2014) 347; Levack, Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 6–7.
Willem de Blécourt, “Witchdoctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition,” Social History 19/3 (1994): 285–303.
Brian P. Levack, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 9.
Lizanne Henderson, “‘Detestable Slaves of the Devil’: Changing Attitudes to Witchcraft in Sixteenth-Century Scotland,” in A History of Everyday Life in Medieval Scotland, ed. Edward J. Cowan and Lizanne Henderson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 226–53.
John Hill Burton, Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1852) vol. 1, 240–3.
Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (2001; Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011) 18.
James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996) 226, 229–31; idem, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001) 74. C. L’Estrange Ewen notes an even later case in September 1717, of Jane Clarke, her son and daughter, who were brought before a Leicester jury on several counts of witchcraft. As many as 25 depositions were given in against them, from witnesses who alleged the suspects had caused a variety of unusual illnesses and could shapeshift into the forms of a cat and a dog. The suspects were blooded, searched for the witch’s mark and were subjected to the swimming test. The informants claimed that the three had been found guilty through each of these tests, but the jury was unconvinced and acquitted them of the charges. Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933; London: Muller, 1970) 390.
William Henderson, Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866; London: The Folklore Society, 1879) 143.
Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone (1841; London: Dent, 1922) 214.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. John Butt (London, 1734; Chelsea: Sheridan Books, 1963) Epistle II, 523.
Rune Hagen, “The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Finnmark,” Acta Borealia 16/1 (1999): 43–62.
Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen, eds., Historia Norwegie, trans. Peter Fisher (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003) 8, 61.
See also Clive Tolley, “The Shamanic Séance in the Historia Norvegiae,” Shaman 2/2 (1994): 135–56.
Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark and William Monter, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 4: The Period of the Witch-Trials (London: The Athlone Press, 2002) 75–6;
Jean Bodin, De la Démonomanie des Sorciers, trans. Randy A. Scott (1580; Toronto: CRRS Publications, 1995).
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (1594; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2005) IV.iii.1–11.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1604; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) A-text, scene i, 121–35.
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) book 2, 662–6.
Montgomerie’s opponent was Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, a well-established poet in his own right and master of the household of James VI. James Cranstoun, ed., Poems of Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1887) 69;
George Stevenson, ed., Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, Supplementary Volume (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1910);
Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) 80–99;
R. D. S. Jack, Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985) passim.
See also T. van Heijnsbergen and M. G. Pittock, eds., Scottish Literary Journal: Alexander Montgomerie (1598–1998), Special Number vol. 26 (1999).
H. M. Shire, ed., Alexander Montgomerie: A Selection from his Songs and Poems (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1960) states that there was at Polwarth an old thorn associated with fertility rites, 82 note.
On modern-day and media representations of the witch figure, see Jes Battis, ed., Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Literature and Popular Culture (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011);
Carrol L. Fry, Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spiritualism in Film (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing, 2008);
Marion Gibson, Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007);
Hannah E. Johnston and Peg Aloi, eds., The New Generation of Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007);
Tanice G. Foltz, “The Commodification of Witchcraft,” in Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, ed. Helen A. Berger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) 137–68;
Rachel Moseley, “Glamorous Witchcraft: Gender and Magic in Teen Film and Television,” Screen 43/4 (2002): 403–22;
Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, eds., Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002);
Tanya Krzywinska, A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000).
Johannes Dillinger, ‘Evil People’: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, trans. Laura Stokes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) 99;
Liv H. Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden: Brill, 2013) 274.
One of the most well-known instances of storm-raising was during the North Berwick trials. The witch’s ability to affect weather was a widespread belief associated with inland and coastal regions. Jonathan Durrant and Michael D. Bailey, Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft,(2nd rev. edn; Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012) 186.
Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (1976; London: Pimlico, 2005) 146–7;
Robert Rowland, “‘Fantasicall and Devilishe Persons’: European Witch-Beliefs in Comparative Perspective,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft, Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 161–9.
On witches’ flight, see Julian Goodare, “Flying Witches in Scotland,” in Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters, ed. Julian Goodare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 159–76. On the witches’ sabbat, see Larner, Enemies of God, 151–6;
Carlo Ginzburg, “Deciphering the Sabbath,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft, Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 121–37;
Willem de Blécourt, “The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archaeologies, Conjectural Histories or Political Mythologies?,” in Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, ed. Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),” 125–45; Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 38–41;
Martine Ostero, “The Concept of the Witches Sabbath in the Alpine Region (1430–1440): Text and Context,” in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, ed. Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008) 15–34;
Willem de Blécourt, “Sabbath Stories: Towards a New History of Witches’ Assemblies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 84–100.
On sexual relations with the Devil, see Larner, Enemies of God, 146–50; Emma Wilby, Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005) 105–7; Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 47.
On the Devil’s or Witch’s Mark, see Larner, Enemies of God, 110–11; Orna Alyagon Darr, “The Devil’s Mark: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Physical Evidence,” Continuity and Change 24/2 (2009): 361–87.
Valerie Flint, Richard Gordon, Georg Luck and Daniel Ogden, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 2: Ancient Greece and Rome (London: The Athlone Press, 1999) 97–101, 254–6;
Matthew W. Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001) 12–17;
Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 5–6, chapters 2–7.
OED. William Dunbar, “Of Februar the Fyiftene Nycht (The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis)” c.1513, in The Makars: The Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, ed. Jaqueline Tasioulas (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1999) 303–13.
OED. “The Flyting between Montgomerie and Polwart,” in Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, ed. George Stevenson (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1910) 174, line 634.
Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) 8.
See also P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Wizards: A History (Stroud: Tempus, 2004) 127–45.
Stevenson, Poems, claimed “Tittest” also referred to a disease that afflicted horses, causing their legs to contract spasmodically. Alexander Montgomerie, “Ane Invectione Against Fortune,” in Poems of Alexander Montgomery, ed. David Irving (Edinburgh: W. and C. Tait, 1821) 138; George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (Edinburgh, 1685; Edinburgh, 1871; Gainsville, 1969) 45.
James Hutchison, “A Sermon on Witchcraft in 1697,” Scottish Historical Review 7 (1910): 390–9.
“Warlock” and “Warwolf”, Jamieson, Dictionary. On the importance of Jamieson’s dictionary, see Susan Rennie, Jamieson’s Dictionary of Scots: The Story of the First Historical Dictionary of the Scots Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Robert W. Thurston, Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001) 5;
William E. Burns, Witch-Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003) 295.
Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, “Six Centuries of Witchcraft in the Netherlands: Themes, Outlines, and Interpretations,” in Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and W. Frijhoff, trans. Rachel M. J. van der Wilden-Fall (Rotterdam: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam, 1991) 1–36;
Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, “The European Witchcraft Debate and the Dutch Variant,” Social History 15 (1990): 181–94.
John MacInnes, “Traditional Belief in Gaelic Society,” in Fantastical Imaginations: The Supernatural in Scottish History and Culture, ed. Lizanne Henderson (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009) 185–95.
Priscilla Bawcutt, ed., The Poems of William Dunbar, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literature, 1998) vol. 1, 114–15, vol. 2, 295–6, 352–4.
Katherine Morris, Sorceress or Witch? The Image of Gender in Medieval Iceland and Northern Europe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991);
Kirsten Hastrup, “Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 383–401; Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, “Finland: The Male Domination,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft, 319–38;
Ronald Hutton, “The Global Context of the Scottish Witch-Hunt,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. J. Goodare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) 16–32;
Raisa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
On male witches, see Apps and Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe, passim; Alison Rowlands, ed., Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), especially Julian Goodare’s article, “Men and the WitchHunt in Scotland,” 149–70;
Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 87, 61–2. See also E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976) 197, who points out that male witches were usually related to a female suspect. Larner indicates that the Scottish examples support this evidence. Monter’s article “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy,” French Historical Studies 20/4 (1997): 563–95 is also useful on this particular gender issue.
See Lauren Martin, “The Devil and the Domestic: Witchcraft, Quarrels and Women’s Work,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. J. Goodare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) 73–89, esp. 83, 85.
Robin Briggs, Witches & Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: Harper Collins, 1996) 264.
James Kirkton, The Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland, ed. C. K. Sharpe (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1817) 421; J. G. MacKay, A History of Fife and Kinross (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896) 147–8;
John Ewart Simpkins, ed., County Folk-Lore, volume VII: Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning Fife with some Notes on Clackmannan and Kinross-shires, The Folk-Lore Society (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1914) 62.
For instance, see Larner, Enemies of God, 100–2, 197; idem, Witchcraft and Religion, 84–8; Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987);
Brian P. Levack, ed., Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, 12 vols. (New York and London: Garland Press, 1992) — vol. 10 deals specifically with ‘Witchcraft, Women and Society’;
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus & the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994);
Sigrid Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, 259–86;
Gerhild S. Williams, Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany (1995; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999);
Willem de Blécourt, “The Making of the Female Witch,” Gender & History 12 (2000): 287–309;
Brian P. Levack, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, 6 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2001) — vol. 4 is entitled ‘Gender and Witchcraft’; Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany,” Past & Present 173 (November 2001): 50–89;
Éva Pócs, “Why Witches are Women,” Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 48/3–4 (2003): 367–83;
Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society;
Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 449–67.
Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans (1980; London: Thames and Hudson, 2000) 32–3;
Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 1: Biblical and Pagan Societies (London: The Athlone Press, 2001) part 2.
B. B. Schmidt, “The ‘Witch’ of En-dor, 1 Sam 28, and Ancient Near Eastern Necromancy,” in Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, ed. M. Meyer and P. Mirecki (Leiden: Brill, 1995) 111–29;
Marie-Louise Thomsen and Frederick H. Cryer, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 1: Biblical and Pagan Societies, series ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) 122, 134;
Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demononology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000) 335–7, 368.
E. J. Burford and S. Shulman, Of Bridles & Burnings. The Punishment of Women (London: Robert Hale, 1994).
Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller, “Some Findings from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft,” in Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, ed. Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 51–70.
SSWD. See also a study by D. Harley, who found 14 Scottish and 2 English instances of midwives as witch suspects in “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch,” Social History of Medicine 3 (1990): 1–26. In support of the midwife-witch theory, see Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 94–103.
See C. A. Holmes, “Women, Witnesses and Witches,” Past and Present 140 (1993): 65–75;
J. A. Sharpe, “Women, Witchcraft and the Legal Process,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. J. Kermode and G. Walker (London: UCL, 1994) 106–24; Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 244–51;
Charles Rogers, Social Life in Scotland, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Grampian Club, 1884) vol. 2, 197.
Compare Stuart MacDonald’s discovery of low demonic content (around 20 per cent) in local trials in Fife with Lauren Martin’s findings of a high incidence of the demonic in central trials (around 75 per cent). See Stuart MacDonald, “In Search of the Devil in Fife Witchcraft Cases, 1560–1705,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. Julian Goodare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) 33–50; Martin, “The Devil and the Domestic,” 77.
Goodare, “Men and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” 159–60; R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 307.
For examples, see Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 174; Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, 265–71. Elizabeth Ewan discusses tensions between women in “‘Many Injurious Words’: Defamation and Gender in Late Medieval Scotland,” in History, Literature, and Music in Scotland, 700–1560, ed. R. A. McDonald (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) 163–86, though she makes no reference to witchcraft.
See, for example, Louise Yeoman, “Hunting the Rich Witch in Scotland: High-Status Witchcraft Suspects and their Persecutors, 1590–1650,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. J. Goodare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) 106–21.
David Daiches, Peter Jones and Jean Jones, eds., A Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment 1730–1790 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986) 2.
David Allan notes that men such as Robert Mudie and John Gibson Lockhart have argued this point. David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993) 3.
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H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1635–58. Agnes Mure MacKenzie stated that before 1700 “trade, farming, scholarship, the arts, were a desert,” Scotland in Modern Times, 1720–1939 (London: Chambers, 1941) 4.
Charles Camic, Experience and Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983) 93–7.
See also William Ferguson, Scotland: 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1968);
T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969) chapter 10;
Roger L. Emerson, “The Enlightenment and Social Structures,” in City and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Fritz and D. Williams (Toronto: Hakkert, 1979) 99–124.
Carlo Denina, An Essay on the Revolutions of Literature, ed. J. Murdoch (London, 1771) 274, qtd in Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment 5, which provides full bibliographical references, as does Mark R. M. Towsey, Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 1–11.
For an interesting discussion on the issue of the Treaty of Union 1707, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
R. G. Cant, “The Scottish Universities and Scottish Society in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1953–66;
Roger L. Emerson, “The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The ‘Select Society of Edinburgh’, 1754–1764,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973): 291–330; Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment, 6.
See J. R. R. Christie, “The Origins and Development of the Scottish Scientific Community, 1680–1760,” History of Science 7 (1974): 122–41;
Roger L. Emerson, “Natural Philosophy and the Problem of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 242 (1986): 243–92; “Sir Robert Sibbald, Kt., the Royal Society of Scotland and the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Annals of Science 45 (1988): 41–72;
I. G. Brown, The Clerks of Penicuik: Portraits of Taste and Talent (Edinburgh: Penicuik House Preservation Trust, 1987); “Critick in Antiquity: Sir John Clerk of Penicuik,” Antiquity 51 (1977): 201–10.
E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 2.
Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, 41. For a more radical assessment, see Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Alan Lane, 2010) 64, 66, 242–4.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (1776; Hartford: Oliver D. Cooke, 1811) vol. 2, 223; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767, ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966) 90–1;
Edward J. Cowan, “Burns and Superstition,” in Love & Liberty: Robert Burns, A Bicentenary Celebration, ed. K. Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997) 229–31.
David Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,” in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 141.
See also J. Y. T. Greig, ed., Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932) vol. 1, 153.
Patrick Walker, Six Saints of the Covenant, ed. D. Hay Fleming, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1901) vol. 1, 36.
See, in general, Hector MacPherson, The Covenanters Under Persecution: A Study of their Religious and Ethical Thought (Edinburgh: W. F. Henderson, 1923) 83–92.
Walker, Six Saints of the Covenant, vol. 1, 32. See also David S. Ross, The Killing Time: Fanaticism, Liberty and the Birth of Britain (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2010).
Hugh Miller, My Schools and Schoolmasters or The Story of My Education (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1869) 31–2.
John W. Leopold, “The Levellers Revolt in Galloway in 1724,” Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society 14 (1980): 4–29; Alistair Livingston, “The Galloway Levellers: A Study of the Origins, Events and Consequences of their Actions,” unpublished MPhil, University of Glasgow, 2009.
Ted Cowan, “The Unions of 1707,” History Scotland 8/2 (March/April 2008): 51–5.
See also Jeffrey Stephen, Scottish Presbyterians and the Act of Union, 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 364.
James King Hewison, The Covenanters: A History of the Church in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution, 2 vols. (Glasgow: John Smith, 1913) vol. 2, 112.
Ian Bostridge, “Witchcraft Repealed,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 310.
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Henderson, L. (2016). The Idea of Witchcraft. In: Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313249_3
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