'Florence Newton's Trial for Witchcraft, Cork, 1661: Sir William Aston's Transcript'
1 ‘Florence Newton’s trial for witchcraft, Cork, 1661: Sir William Aston’s transcript’, Royal Society, London, RB 1/37/5, fols 96r-102v. The Boyle Papers. Edited by Dr Andrew Sneddon, Ulster University. Keywords: witchcraft trial; Florence Newton; Youghal 1661; Ireland Introduction I Ireland avoided the ravages of later medieval, early modern, European witch-hunting that claimed around 50, 000 lives, the overall proportion of whom were women, around 80 percent. In the early modern period, Scotland executed 1500 people for witchcraft, England hanged 500, while Wales put five witches to death.1 Ireland hosted only four witchcraft trials under the dictates of the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act, involving: Marion Fisher, 1655; Florence Newton, 1661; and the nine ‘Islandmagee Witches’, convicted respectively at the Lent and Summer Assizes held at Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim in 1711.2 The Boyle papers in the library of the Royal Society, London contain a transcript of witness testimonies given at Florence Newton’s trial for witchcraft at Cork Assizes in September 1661 and signed by 1 Julian Goodare, The European witch-hunt (London, 2016), pp 27, 267; Brian Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland: law, politics and religion (London, 2008), pp 1-2; Richard Suggett, A history of magic and witchcraft in Wales (Stroud, 2008), p. 12. 2Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and magic in Ireland (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 71; ‘An Act Against Witchcraft and Sorcerie’, 28 Eliz. I, c. 2, [Ire.] (1586). The prosecution of Alice Kyteler and associates in Kilkenny in 1324 has recently been regarded as a medieval prototype of an early modern witch trial: Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the witch, and the wild Irish: vengeance and heresy in medieval Ireland (Ithaca, 2015), pp.
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