Reginald Scot
Reginald Scot, born around 1538 in Smeeth, Kent, England, was a notable figure primarily recognized for his critical views on witchcraft and superstition. The son of a landowner, Scot had a diverse career that included roles as a surveyor of flood defenses and a military engineer. He gained prominence with his seminal work, "The Discoverie of Witchcraft," published in 1584, where he expressed skepticism toward the witch hunts prevalent in his time. Scot argued against the common attribution of misfortune to malevolent forces, advocating instead for a rational understanding of events as random occurrences. His views were controversial, drawing the ire of King James I, who ordered later editions of his book to be burned.
Scot's writings also examined the practices of conjurers and illusionists, revealing how seemingly magical feats were achieved. Despite being a progressive thinker for his time, advocating for the rights of the persecuted and critiquing the misuse of scripture, his ideas were largely dismissed during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. His death occurred on October 9, 1599, but his legacy as a pioneer of rational thought and skepticism towards superstition has endured.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Reginald Scot
Writer
- Born: c. 1538
- Birthplace: Smeeth, Kent, England
- Died: October 9, 1599
- Place of death: Smeeth, Kent, England
Biography
Reginald Scott, who is better known as Reginald Scot because of the byline on his most famous book, was born around 1538 in Smeeth, Kent, England, the son of landowner Richard Scott and his wife Mary, née Whetenhall. According to Anthony Wood, the chronicler of Oxford University writers, Scot attended the university’s Hart Hall, but there is no record of his graduation. Scot married Jane Cobbe on October 11, 1568 at Brabourne, Kent, and they had one daughter. He subsequently married a widow, Alice Collyar.
Scot claimed to be financially dependent on his cousin, Sir Thomas Scott of Scott’s Hall, whose biography he wrote, although the book has been lost. However, Scot appears to have been involved in various enterprises that should have provided him with a decent income. He was surveyor of flood defenses at Romney Marsh for many years, and in the 1580’s he worked with his cousin and Thomas Digges on the defenses of Dover Harbor. He probably undertook other, deliberately unrecorded, endeavors as a military engineer; his involvement in the Dover project is known because he compiled a record of it for use in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. He was elected a member of Parliament for New Romney in 1589.
Scot’s first publication was a textbook on the cultivation of hops, based on his personal experience of that science. A similar reliance on the practical lessons of experience are apparent in his second and more important work, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, first published in 1584. The book was not universally well received; King James I, who had written a book expressing contrary opinions, ordered a later edition to be burned by the public hangman. However, the book was widely read. William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton were familiar with it, so it evidently served as a source for many literary images of witchcraft, which is ironic, given its scathing skepticism.
Scot took particular exception to a witch-hunting manual produced by the French magistrate Jean Bodin, whose use of scriptural authority and “evidence” he assaulted with great fervor. He was the first person to attack the processes of translation that had mistakenly introduced references to witchcraft into the Bible, but he cut to the heart of the matter by ridiculing the common determination to attribute misfortune to forces of evil rather than accepting them as the vicissitudes of chance. He portrayed persecuted witches as victims of prejudice and stupidity rather than evildoers and maintained that their torture-wrung confessions were meaningless. He was equally hard on people who posed as magicians for gain, including an extensive survey of the methods of conjurors and illusionists by which seemingly magical effects could be derived, which was separately reprinted as The Art of Juggling in 1612 and subsequently integrated into the often reprinted Hocus Pocus Junior, first issued in 1634. His concluding chapters on demonology however, were replaced in the 1665 edition by a spurious version that is unfortunately reproduced in many modern editions.
Scot was a heroic paragon of sanity and reason, far ahead of his time, but his arguments went largely unheeded in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and the writers who borrowed from him did not reproduce his skepticism. He died on October 9, 1599 at Smeeth, Kent.