Special Collections
Book of the Month, August 2008
A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft
William Perkins
[Cambridge]: C. Legge, 1608
H.P.L. [Perkins] Rare Books Case
The moderate Puritan Church of England clergyman William Perkins (1558-1602) was, according to his twentieth-century editor, William Breward, the most widely known theologian of the Elizabethan church, who by the end of the sixteenth century had replaced Calvin and Beza near the top of the English religious best-seller list.
Most of Perkins’s 47 works were devotional or theological. A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft is polemical, and contains practically all that Perkins wrote on the subject. The work may have originated in sermons preached by Perkins in Cambridge in the 1590s. In it, Perkins rejects the opinion propounded by Reginald Scot in his famous Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) that witchcraft exists only in the imagination; to Perkins, some mysteries were inexplicable without it. At the same time, he recognized the danger of viewing psychological aberrations as witchcraft. Perkins’s avowed purpose in writing was primarily: “because Witchcraft is a rife and common sinne in these oure our daies, and very many are intangled with it, being either practitioners thereof in their owne persons, or at the least, yeilding [sic] seeke for helpe and counsel of such as practise it” (p. 1), and also to refute Scot’s view that there were no witches. He set himself to consider three points: the nature of witchcraft; the ground of its practice; and how many kinds and differences there were of it. This third point takes up four of the seven chapters, being divided into divination; “working witchcraft” (charms and juggling); what a witch is (good and bad witches); the punishment of witches (“why withces are and ought to be punished with death”) and the application of the doctrine of witchcraft to Elizabethan times.
The work was popular, being reprinted in 1610. In addition, a Latin translation, Basanologia, was published in Hanover in 1610, and a Dutch translation, Tractaet van de Ongodlijeke Toover-const, appeared in Amsterdam in 1611. The text carried particular weight in New England, where witchcraft was a capital offence. This copy is one of over 40 books about witchcraft printed before 1701 held in the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature. It is inscribed by Frederick Hockley (1808-1885), a prominent 19th-century Rosicrucian and occultist.
shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 
020 7862 8470
