Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England

Peter Elmer studied for his doctoral dissertation under Stuart Clark at Swansea University, working on the religious origins of medical reform in seventeenth-century England. He taught for seventeen years at the Open University, and in 2012 was appointed as Senior Research Fellow at Exeter University, where he currently works with a group of colleagues on a Wellcome Trust funded project designed to create a database of medical practitioners in early modern England, Wales, and Ireland.

[M]asterfully researched....This book bursts with a wealth of case studies and microhistories that will no doubt assist witchcraft scholars, even if their research does not pivot around politics....Overall, this is a valuable and impressive contribution to current scholarship.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. Witchcraft, Religion, and the State in Elizabethan and Jacobean England ; 3. Witchcraft in an Age of Rebellion, 1625-1649 ; 4. Witchcraft in an Age of Political Uncertainty: Interregnum England, 1649-60 ; 5. Redrawing the Boundaries of the Confessional State: Witchcraft, Dissent, and Latitudinarianism in Restoration England ; 6. 'Rebellion is as the sin of Witchcraft': Anglicanism, the State, and the Decline of Witchcraft in Restoration England ; 7. Witchcraft, Enthusiasm, and the Rage of Party: the Politics of Decline in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England ; Bibliography