fired the imagination of scholars who would, in decades to come, write descriptive volumes on witches and familiars. Examples of the growth and development of familiar scholarship are found in Folklore, which consistently contributes articles on traditional beliefs in England and early modern Europe.
In the first decades of the 1900s, familiars are identified as “niggets”, which are “creepy-crawly things that witches kept all over them”.
Margaret Murray delves into variations of the familiar found in witchcraft practices. Many of the sources she employs are trial records and demonological texts from early to modern England. These include the 1556 Essex Witchcraft Trials of the Witches of Hatfield Perevil, the 1582 Trial of the Witches of St. Osyth, and the 1645 Essex Trials with Matthew Hopkins acting as a Witch-finder. In 1921, Murray published The Witch Cult in Western Europe.. Her information concerning familiars comes from witchcraft trials in Essex in the 1500s and 1600s.
Recent scholarship is multi-disciplinary, integrating feminist-historical and world-historical approaches. Deborah Willis’ Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England links the witch’s attributed relationship with the familiar to a bizarre and misplaced corruption of motherhood and maternal power.
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