author

Alexander Roberts

d. 1620

Best known for a vivid 1616 work on witchcraft, this early 17th-century English clergyman wrote at the point where religion, law, and fear of the supernatural collided. His surviving book is now read as a revealing window into the beliefs and anxieties of Jacobean England.

1 Audiobook

A Treatise of Witchcraft

A Treatise of Witchcraft

by Alexander Roberts

About the author

Alexander Roberts was an English divine and preacher who died in 1620. His best-known work, A Treatise of Witchcraft (1616), identifies him as a Bachelor of Divinity and preacher at King's Lynn in Norfolk.

The book combines general arguments about witchcraft with a detailed account connected to the case of Mary Smith, a woman executed after a local witchcraft prosecution. That makes Roberts interesting not just as a religious writer, but as a witness to how belief, preaching, and the courts overlapped in early modern England.

Little biographical information about his life seems to be widely confirmed online beyond his church role, his 1616 publication, and his death date. Even so, his work has endured because it captures the language and mindset of a period deeply preoccupied with the reality of witchcraft.