Large Hands, Wide Eares, and Piercing Sights’: The ‘Discoveries' of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Witch Pamphlets

[...]many pamphlets contain discomfort about discovery and truth. Because witchcraftitself was often involved with deception and secret tricks, the language used by some of the pamphlets to describe it invokes a wider set of ways to talk about trickery and dishonesty, raising questions about the nature of witchcraftitself.52 The earnest A true and just recorde (1582) reports the arch-discoverer Brian Darcy 'promising to the saide Ursley, that if she would deale plainely and confesse the trueth, that shee should have favour & so by giving her faire speeches shee confessed'. The witch pamphlets did their best to cope with them by invoking their opposites, the classic gallows-repentance and prison conversion narratives, implying the comparative sinfulness of the witch next to other, repentant, criminals. [...]The wonderfull discoverie: 'here I leave her, until she come to her Execution, where you shall heare she died very impenitent...which was a very fearfull thing to all that were present, who knew shee was guiltie.'72 The witches of Northamptonshire has two unrepentant death scenes, the more detailed of which explicitly invokes the more satisfactory prison-repentance narrative: The pamphlets had helped to open up a dialogue about the safety of witch discoveries that continued to rage through seventeenth century, albeit later in an environment that was increasingly hostile to the practical application of those discoveries in the form of convictions (and subsequently, prosecutions) in the courts.86 We are increasingly familiar, thanks to Peter Elmer and Ian Bostridge among others, with the cultural changes of the later seventeenth century that produced an environment less sympathetic to witch trials - the focus on other kinds of deviant during the upheavals of the mid-century, the gradual development of multiplicity in religious and political opinion, developing interests in the natural sciences and in scientific and legal questions about standards of proof - as well as with the sense that witch beliefs did not die quietly.87 It has been argued here that, rather earlier in the period, cheap print had begun to lay the foundations for the decline in the witch trials, by undermining the credit of the legal and popular detection of witches, of the dissemination of these detections to a reading public, and even the credit and credibility of the witch discourse itself. See J. Barnard and M. Bell, The Early Seventeenth Century York Book Trade and John Foster's Inve