author

John Webster

1611–1682

A 17th-century English cleric, physician, and chemist, he is remembered for writing boldly about education, religion, and the natural world. His best-known work challenged popular beliefs about witchcraft, making him a strikingly independent voice of his time.

1 Audiobook

The displaying of supposed witchcraft : Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth of apparitions, the nature of astral and sydereal spirits, the force of charms, and philters; with other abstruse matters

The displaying of supposed witchcraft : Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth of apparitions, the nature of astral and sydereal spirits, the force of charms, and philters; with other abstruse matters

by John Webster

About the author

Born in Yorkshire in 1610, he later described himself as educated at Cambridge, though later reference works note that no university record has been found to confirm this. He became a curate at Kildwick in 1634 and was also associated with teaching in Clitheroe.

During the English Civil War, he served the Parliamentarian side as both a surgeon and an army chaplain. In the years that followed, he preached as a nonconformist minister, moved through several religious circles, and eventually left the ministry to practice as a physician.

He wrote on education, religion, alchemy, and medicine, but he is especially known for The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), a skeptical study that argued against many accepted claims about witchcraft. That mix of religious intensity, scientific curiosity, and willingness to question received ideas gives his work its lasting interest.