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Simon F. Davies, A Possible Stationers’ Register Entry for Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft, Notes and Queries, Volume 59, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 41–43, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr232
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REGINALD Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft was first published in 1584. It is usually claimed that the work was not entered in the Stationers’ Register. Eight years earlier, in September 1576, bookseller William Edmonds registered ‘A warninge againste the superstition of wytches and the madnes of magicians’.1 There is no known work, extant or otherwise, to which this entry refers. Might it be possible that the two are connected? It may not be a stretch too far to consider whether this entry refers to an earlier version of Scot's work.
First, the reasons for giving consideration to the idea. The title is clearly in keeping with Scot's text; it seems to imply a sceptical attack on belief in witches, attacking it as superstitious and a ‘madnes’, just as Scot does.2 The alliteration used in the title is very similar in style to that Scot used in the final title of his work: the long subtitle of the Discouerie explains how the work deals with ‘the impietie of inchanters … the pestilent practises of Pythonists’. And Scot makes no mention of another English treatise on witchcraft—something he surely would have done had he known of the existence of an earlier treatise, for his research was copious; he cites over two hundred authors, amongst which are several English news pamphlets on witch trials,3 as well as other recent English works referring to magic.4 Likewise no subsequent writer on the subject makes reference to an earlier treatise.5
