In 1736 Parliament decided in the name of justice and reason that witchcraft was no longer to be considered a criminal act, but rather an offence against the country's newly enlightened state. The law effectively prevented any member of the legislature, judiciary or Anglican Church from formally expressing a belief in the continued existence of witches. This chapter looks at the patterns of educated responses to the continued belief in witchcraft and magic. It examines how new ideas and changing interpretations of the supernatural amongst the middle and upper classes influenced and impinged upon the continued popular belief in witchcraft and magic. There were other forms of supernatural beliefs that continued to engage the minds of many educated men and women. Spirit possession and related diabolic phenomena attracted considerable curiosity, not only in the eighteenth century but also in the nineteenth century, when new intellectual interpretations of the supernatural emerged.

Matthew Poole was a strict Presbyterian clergyman, scholar and organizer, a minor figure of the great age of the 'intelligencer' in the seventeenth century. By 1657, Poole had conceived of a project for the collection and publication of prodigy accounts, initially in England and then throughout the British Isles. The early 1660s saw the most widespread and significant controversy over prodigies owning the early modern period, the Mirabilis Annus affair, as well as smaller conflicts leading up to it. Mirabilis Annus made clear its political point very early on. Rather than merely adducing specific prodigies to demonstrate divine displeasure, it adopted an apocalyptic tactic of delegitimizing the regime through the sheer quantity of prodigies alleged to have taken place in the preceding 'Year of Wonders'. The Mirabilis Annus affair set the terms of the debate on the providential political import of prodigies for the rest of the seventeenth century.

This chapter explores who the witches were and how they were perceived by the communities they lived in. It examines two different types of evidence: folklore sources and newspapers. In this chapter, the author hopes to rescue witches from their trite and quaint portrayal in the recycled work of some popular folklore publications, and place them in their rightful social setting. The chapter explores some of the social arenas in which suspicions of bewitchment formed and accusations were made. For the modern period, the folklore evidence provides important information on the diversity of beliefs concerning witches, and the way in which the popular perception of the witch was subtly influenced over time. Conversely, the newspaper court reports contain very little of the extraordinary activities generally attributed to witches, but instead reveal the mundane social basis of accusations and assaults against witches.

The reign of Queen Anne (1702-14) was highly polarized politically and religiously, and saw a voluminous outpouring of political and satirical writing, much of it dealing with political prodigies. Although some prodigy-writing in the providential tradition did appear in the Whig press, prominent elite Whigs like Joseph Addison did not try to defend providential interpretation. Addison treated the alleged Jacobite attempt to exploit the aurora as the final ridiculous shift of a defeated and discredited faction: 'The Party, indeed, that is opposite to our present happy Settlement, seem to be driven out of the Hopes of all human Methods for carrying on their Cause, and are therefore reduced to the poor Comfort of Prodigies and Old Women's Fables'. The public importance of prodigies continued to diminish throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, as satirists and journalists ridiculed providential interpretation.

From the late seventeenth century onwards, Parliament and the judiciary had been taking an increasingly sceptical attitude towards the existence of witchcraft, resulting in a gradual process of secular and ecclesiastical detachment from popular concerns over the problem of witchcraft. Applications to authority figures to act against suspected witches continued to be lodged well into the nineteenth century. Examining witch prosecutions as a series of individual cases, rather than as a general phenomenon, reflects adversely on the notion of a widespread popular disillusionment among the witch-believing public with the effectiveness of the justice being offered to them by the end of the seventeenth century. Elite authority and popular justice maintained a symbiotic relationship with regard to the threat of witchcraft. This chapter examines the nature of this symbiotic relationship between local agents of elite authority and popular justice, and how that relationship changed over time.

A woman gives birth to a monster. An army of mice invades a rural area. Three suns are seen in the sky. Today, such phenomena epitomize the intellectually marginal, relegated to the journalism of the supermarket checkout line. There have been, however, many societies where these events were not marginal, but important clues to understanding the nature of the cosmos and the destiny of human society. The transformation of this attitude in a particular society, that of late Stuart England, is the subject of this book. The most important work on the role of prodigies in European popular culture has been Niccoli's study of early sixteenth-century Italy. Niccoli associates providential prodigy interpretation with popular prophecy and astrology. The unregulated talk about prodigy of the Civil War period was unacceptable to many of England's religious, political, and intellectual elite.

Although the actions of the mass of the people are no longer strongly bound by occult forces, they continue to maintain a variety of observances to ward off misfortune. The experience of misfortune has changed profoundly in our predominantly urban, welfare society. While financial hardship no longer results from the death of a pig or a cow, for instance, the reduction of European subsidies constitutes a serious case of misfortune for farmers. The belief in fortune-telling continues, for instance, because it functions as a means of assuaging personal insecurities about the future. The expression of these insecurities may have changed over the centuries, but the fundamental fear of being hurt, emotionally or financially, will always lead people to seek comfort in the realm of magic. In other ways, the popular belief in the supernatural has continued by a process of adaptation to changing perceptions of the world.

This chapter discusses the declining belief in witchcraft. When scrutinised carefully, many previously held assumptions concerning the declining popular belief in witchcraft and magic prove to have little foundation. One way to assess the declining belief in witchcraft is by examining the frequency with which people conducted related magical rituals and observances. Another gauge of declining belief in witchcraft is the frequency of accusations. A few historians have attempted, albeit briefly, to characterise the process of the decaying structure of popular belief in witchcraft. James Obelkevitch has suggested that witchcraft disappeared after 'completing a long-term process of depersonalisation'. The popular belief in witchcraft declined largely because witchcraft was not adaptable to the fundamentally different uncertainties and demands of new market forces and modern mass culture. Its demise, therefore, was rooted firmly in the cultural rather than in the intellectual sphere.