Letters on demonology and witchcraft

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft came out in 1830. The Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott wrote it for John Murray's Family Library series. It takes the shape of letters addressed to J. G. Lockhart, his son-in-law.

There are ten of those letters, and the informal shape of them lets Scott write as though he were talking, wandering where the material takes him. He surveys attitudes to witchcraft and demonology from biblical times to the nineteenth century, uses a long run of individual cases as illustrations, and finds room as well for second sight, brownies, elves, fairies, ghosts and the mythologies of the Germanic peoples.

Scott was a lifelong collector of folklore with a wide range of primary and secondary sources behind him. He treats belief in these phenomena as the product of ignorance and prejudice, cleared away in the end by eighteenth-century rationalism, and he observes that witchcraft prosecutions were often aimed at heretics and political undesirables. The book had mixed notices when it appeared and then found a wide readership, helping to feed the Victorian appetite for Gothic and ghostly fiction, and it is now read as a pioneering and analytical piece of scientific anthropology.