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 There is a mass of unpublished materials in libraries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.

To this day, there has been no thorough investigation or complete
analysis of the history of the witch persecutions. The true story has
been distorted by partisanship and ignorance, and left to exploitation
by the romancer, the empiric, and the sciolist.

"Of the origin and nature of the delusion we know perhaps enough; but of
the causes and paths of its spread, of the extent of its ravages, of its
exact bearing upon the intellectual and religious freedom of its times,
of the soul-stirring details of the costly struggle by which it was
overborne we are lamentably ill informed." (_The Literature of
Witchcraft_, p. 66, BURR.)

It must serve in this brief narrative to merely note, within the