1830 First Edition Walter Scott - Letters on Demonology & Witchcraft - WITCHES & FAIRIES
(description)
Author : Scott, Sir Walter.
Title : Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J.G. Lockhart, Esq.
Publisher : London: John Murray, 1830. First Edition.
Language : Text in English
Size : 6 " X 4 "
Pages : ix-402 pages.
Binding : Attractive and very good full morocco leather binding (hinges slightly scuffed but tight, overall slightly scuffed and worn) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content : Very good content (bright, tight and clean, rare foxing - mainly to the endpaper - as shown).
Illustrations : Complete with the frontispiece illustration of the Bow in Edinburgh.
Estimate : (USD 400 - USD 600)
The book : Rare first edition of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft in a beautiful and attractive binding. -- In ill health following a stroke, Sir Walter Scott wrote Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft at the behest of his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, who worked for a publishing firm. Letters was written when educated society believed itself in enlightened times due to advances in modern science. Letters, however, revealed that all social classes still held beliefs in ghosts, witches, warlocks, fairies, elves, diabolism, the occult, and even werewolves. Sourcing from prior sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology along with contemporary accounts from England, Europe, and North America (Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi, for one), Scott's discourses on the psychological, religious, physical, and preternatural explanations for these beliefs are essential reading for acolytes of the dark and macabre; the letters dealing with witch hunts, trials (Letters Eight and Nine), and torture are morbidly compelling. Scott was neither fully pro-rational modernity nor totally anti-superstitious past, as his skepticism of one of the "new" sciences (skullology, as he calls it) is made clear in a private letter to a friend. Thus, Letters is both a personal and intellectual examination of conflicting belief systems, when popular science began to challenge superstition in earnest.
The author: Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.