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Above all, in its literature does witchcraft exhibit the conclusive
proof of its age, its hydra-headed forms, and its influence in the
intellectual and spiritual development of the races of men.
What of this literature? Count in it all the works that treat of the
subject in its many phases, and its correlatives, and it is limitless, a
literature of all times and all lands.
Christian and pagan gave it place in their religions, dogmas, and
articles of faith and discipline, and in their codes of law; and for
four hundred years, from the appeal of Pope John XXII, in 1320, to
extirpate the Devil-worshipers, to the repeal of the statute of James I
in 1715, the delusion gave point and force to treatises, sermons,
romances, and folk-lore, and invited, nay, compelled, recognition at the
hands of the scientist and legist, the historian, the poet and the
dramatist, the theologian and philosopher.
But the monographic literature of witchcraft, as it is here considered,
is limited, in the opinion of a scholar versed in its lore, to fifteen
hundred titles. There is a mass of unpublished materials in libraries
and archives at home and abroad, and of information as to witchcraft and
the witch trials, accessible in court records, depositions, and current
accounts in public and private collections, all awaiting the coming of
some master hand to transform them into an exhaustive history of the
most grievous of human superstitions.
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