What did Thomas Plume think about witchcraft?
201
In this clearly anti-Catholic anecdote the heroic Englishman
Child exposes not just fraudulent possession but also the
credulity of the people and the machinations of the priest.
Plume moves on from the possession anecdote to record Dr
Child’s scepticism about the biblical story of the visit by Saul –
supposedly in disguise so that he could not be recognized – to
the Witch of Endor, who supposedly raised Samuel from the
dead at Saul’s request. According to Plume, Child and others
like him believed that the Witch of Endor must have known
who Saul was because of his unusual height and ‘..th[at] ye
apparent Sam[uel] was only a confederate priest brought in,
who spoke fortuitously’.
71
There are some tantalizing links between the James I and
Dr Child anecdotes and texts in the Plume Library which hint
at the possibility that Plume’s anecdote-writing was linked
in some way to his book-collecting and reading practices,
although it is unfortunately not clear whether Plume’s
reading shaped his choice of which anecdotes to include in
his notebooks, or whether Plume’s initial interest in certain
anecdotes encouraged him to read further around the themes
that they touched on (although I think the latter more
probable).
72
Plume probably read James’s
Daemonologie
at
some stage of his life, for instance; the Plume Library has a
Latin copy of the text from the collected works of James that
were published in 1619.
73
It is not annotated, but then few of
Plume’s books are. What is more striking is the fact that the
Library also has copies of the two texts which James cited in
the preface to
Daemonologie
:
De Praestigiis Daemonum
(
On the Tricks of Devils
),
by Johann Weyer, which was
first published in 1563 (although Plume had the 1568
Latin edition, published in Basel),
74
and
The Discoverie of
Witchcraft
by Reginald Scot, published in 1584.
75
The works
Plate 3: Thomas Plume’s Notebook MS 30, p. 35: Dr Child anecdote.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of Thomas Plume’s Library.