The Witchcraft Papers [antikvár]

intRoductionThe county of Essex, a flat, low-lying area on the eastern coast of England, has retained a timeless and rural charm despite the encroachment of nearby London and the determined efforts of those arms of the commuter, roads and railways, to penetrate to its farthest corners. Still it is a county, of small, quaint villages, of towns dominated by the agricultural pursuits of the region, and of city centers so full of historical buildings and monuments as to have resisted the tide of shopping complexes and multistory car parks. It is a county of history and tradition, an area of stability where families can be found who have lived in the same districtseven in the same housesfor generations. It is a place rich in history, a county that has played host to royalty, sent men to the far corners of the earth, and nursed writers and artists of the highest quality.Essex County also became the center of, and the most bloody contributor to, the terrible witchcraft hysteria that blighted the English countryside from the mid-1560s to the close of the seventeenth century. This earned the county, for all time, the epithet of "The Witch County."As anyone with even the most perfunctory knowledge of the subject will know, witchcraft has a long and complex historystretching back into the mists of antiquity if you accept its origins as being in the ancient fertility cult Wicca or, alternatively, as a somewhat later invention of the Church and its bloody tribunal the Inquisition, which