THE LAST CONSPIRACY: SABBAT, APOCALYPSE, AND ANTI- CATHOLICISM IN ENGLISH DEMONOLOGICAL TREATISES (C. 1587?1648)

AGUSTIN MENDEZ

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

University of Pennsylvania Press

Lugar: Pennsylvania; Año: 2021 vol. 16 p. 84 - 113

1556-8547

Through an analysis of the works of George Gi$ord (c. 1548?1620), Henry Holland (1556?1603), William Perkins (1558?1602), Alexander Roberts, John Cotta (1575?1650), Thomas Cooper, Richard Bernard (1568?1641), Matthew Hopkins (c.1620?1647), and John Stearne (1610?1670) I will argue that the elaborated concept of witchcraft was far from absent in English elite demonological theory. Local demonologists viewed witchcraft as a Satanic conspiracy; however, they did not consider the template of the sabbat as a way to depict this conspiracy. This is because much of the imagined sabbat was simply an inversion of Catholicism, and English demonologists tended not to treat witchcraft as inverted Catholicism, but rather Catholicism itself as inverted religion?as the ultimate form of witchcraft. Thus, in early modern England, witchcraft was understood as a threat not circumscribed to the space of local communities, but as a conspiracy much larger in scale, involving the interrelationship demonologists perceived between that heinous crime, Catholicism, and the imminent Apocalypse