ence" (21). For example, in a notorious prosecution of a so-called "pythonist," Scot says that a woman (Alice) was maliciously targeted as a procuring witch by a maid with histrionic talents, including ventriloquism, who behaved like a woman possessed at Alice's behest and threw her voice to make it appear that Alice was speaking through a snake's mouth. Thus the real criticism of the sham magic is the interrogation of the motives of those who targeted her:
How could mother Alice escape condemnation and hanging, being arreigned upon this evidence; when a poore woman hath beene cast away, upon a cousening oracle, or rather a false lie, devised by Feats the juggler, through the malicious instigation of some of hir adversaries? (Scot 123).
Elsewhere, Scot compares the credulous people who used to believe in the mythical fairy Robin Goodfellow or in hobgoblins and the credulous in the current period who believed in "hags and witches . . . and in time to come, a witch will be as much derided and contemned, and as plainlie perceived, as the illusion and knaverie of
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