John Webster, the royal society & the displaying of supposed witchcraft (1677)

Abstract

This paper publishes for the first time the dedication to the Royal Society that John Webster wrote for his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), but which failed to appear in the published work. It also investigates the circumstances in which the book received the Royal Society's imprimatur, in the light of the Society's ambivalent attitude towards witchcraft and related phenomena in its early years. The paper concludes that the role of Sir Jonas Moore as Vice-President in licensing the book was highly irregular, evidently reflecting the troubled state of the Society in the mid to late 1670s.