num_pages: 221
description: In ill health following a stroke Sir Walter Scott wrote Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft at the behest of his son-in-law J. G. Lockhart who worked for a publishing firm. The book proved popular and Scott was paid six hundred pounds which he desperately needed (despite his success as a novelist Scott was almost ruined when the Ballantyne publishing firm where he was a partner went bankrupt in 1826).Letters was written when educated society believed itself in enlightened times due to advances in modern science. The book however revealed that all social classes still held beliefs in ghosts witches warlocks fairies elves diabolism the occult and even werewolves. Sourcing from prior sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology along with contemporary accounts from England Europe and North America (Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi for one) Scott's discourses on the psychological religious physical and preternatural explanations for these beliefs are essential reading for acolytes of the dark and macabre; the letters dealing with witch hunts trials (Letters Eight and Nine) and torture are morbidly compelling.Scott was neither fully pro-rational modernity nor totally anti-superstitious past as his skepticism of one of the new sciences (skullology as he calls it) is made clear in a private letter to a friend. Thus Letters is both a personal and intellectual examination of conflicting belief systems when popular science began to challenge superstition in earnest.
language: English
title: Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
publisher: None