Reginald Scot

Reginald Scot (c. 1538–1599) was an English country gentleman of Kent, a justice of the peace and member of Parliament for New Romney, remembered for a single book. The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) argued, at a time when witch trials were multiplying, that the supposed powers of witches were impossible, that confessions came from melancholy or torture, and that many wonders were conjurers' tricks. The book drew on hundreds of authorities and on Scot's own observation of Kentish trials. It was attacked by King James in his Daemonologie and reputedly burned on his orders, but it influenced Shakespeare and Middleton and was reprinted in the seventeenth century.