Scottish demonology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its theological background

Abstract

What general conclusions may be drawn from this study of continental influences upon Scottish demonoIogical literature? We have seen that the first witchcraft work, the treatise of James VI, drew principally on continental Protestant authors, and mentions no Catholic demonoIogists at all. His secular successors in Scotland, represented principally by the legal profession, drew nearly all their citations from European Catholic lawyers; his theological successors took their demonology at second-hand from their Puritan brethren in England. All Scottish writers included some ingredients of ancient popular superstition. The remarkable feature of their work is that there is so little difference between their beliefs, arguments, and conclusions. The Scottish theologian learned from the Cambridge puritan those same intellectual inanities that the Scottish lawyer derived from the continental canonist.The rise and fall of demonoIogicaI belief reflects fairly accurately the rate of intellectual development in Scotland. Sixteenth century Scotland was slow to receive new ideas: reformed theoiogy came late; intellectual demonology arrived a hundred years old. Scepticism, on the other hand, was absorbed relatively quickly, for France and Germany were still burning witches after Scotland had ceased. At the time when the new Witchcraft Act was passed, Scotland was entering that century of intellectual dominance in Europe which she has never approached either before or since.