This folder glossary is a shelf-specific slice from the central Good Works Glossary. The central glossary remains the source of truth.
English Folklore & Old English Terms
Literary Forms & Techniques
Alliterative Verse — The dominant metrical form of Old English and Middle English poetry before the rise of rhyming verse. Each line is divided into two half-lines joined by alliteration — the repetition of initial consonant sounds in stressed syllables. Beowulf, the works of the Gawain Poet, and Piers Plowman are composed in this form. The technique binds meaning through sound: the ear hears the connection before the mind parses the grammar.
Bob and Wheel — A distinctive stanzaic device used by the Gawain Poet in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. After a block of unrhymed alliterative long lines, the stanza closes with a short "bob" (a one- or two-syllable line) followed by a "wheel" — four short rhyming lines. The effect is a sudden tightening: the expansive alliterative narrative snaps into crisp, epigrammatic closure. No other Middle English alliterative poem uses this form so consistently.
Broadside Ballad — A popular song printed on a single sheet of paper ("broadside") and sold cheaply in streets and markets from the 16th century onward.
Chapbook — A small, cheaply printed pamphlet sold by itinerant vendors (chapmen) from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Chapbooks were a primary vehicle for the transmission of fairy tales, ballads, folk legends, and sensational stories to literate but non-elite audiences. Jack and the Beanstalk, Tom Thumb, and many of the tales collected by Joseph Jacobs in English Fairy Tales (1890) survived through this medium. The word derives from "chapman" (Old English cēapmann, "merchant"). Broadsides were the mass media of early modern England — news, scandal, love, murder, and comedy distributed for a penny. Many of the ballads in the English Folklore collection circulated in this form before being gathered by antiquarians.
Comitatus — The bond of mutual obligation between a Germanic lord and his warriors. The lord provides protection, treasure, weapons, and feasting; the warriors provide loyalty and service unto death. This relationship is the central social institution of the Anglo-Saxon world and the ethical foundation of Beowulf. To fail one's lord in battle is the worst shame; to be a lord who fails his warriors is nearly as bad. The mead-hall is the physical embodiment of the comitatus, and exile from the hall is exile from the social order itself.
Child Ballad — One of the 305 traditional English and Scottish ballads catalogued by Francis James Child (1825–1896) in his monumental The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898). Child numbers remain the standard reference system: "Barbara Allen" is Child 84, "Sir Patrick Spens" is Child 58, "The Twa Corbies" is Child 26. The collection preserves multiple variants of each ballad, reflecting the oral tradition's living variability.
Dream-Vision — A medieval literary form in which the narrator falls asleep and experiences a visionary dream, often in an idealized landscape and often guided by an allegorical or supernatural figure. The form descends from classical models (Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy) through the French Roman de la Rose to the English tradition. Pearl and The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland are both dream-visions in this collection. The form allows the poet to explore theological or philosophical ideas through narrative, and the dream-frame grants licence to see what waking eyes cannot.
Jig (also Iigge) — In Elizabethan theatre, a short comic afterpiece performed after the main play, combining song, dance, and bawdy humor. Jigs were the speciality of clowns like William Kemp and Richard Tarlton, and were immensely popular with groundlings. Kemp's jigs were famous enough to be printed and sold as broadsides. The form disappeared from the London stage by the mid-seventeenth century but persisted in provincial entertainments. The word also denotes the lively dance itself — Kemp describes his journey to Norwich as performed in "mad Iigges and merry iestes."
Lord Have Mercy Upon Us — The formula written on placards nailed to the doors of plague-stricken houses in Early Modern London. During outbreaks of bubonic plague (especially the great visitations of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665), parish authorities marked infected households with this phrase, sometimes accompanied by a red cross, to warn passers-by and enforce quarantine. Thomas Dekker in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) describes the "bill of Lord haue mercy upon" still wet on doors — a visceral image of plague as a mark on the body of the city. The phrase entered common usage as shorthand for plague terror: "at the name of Londoners, the Justice clapping his hand on his brest (as who should say, Lord haue mercy vpon vs)."
Plague Pamphlet — A distinct genre of Early Modern English prose literature written during or immediately after outbreaks of bubonic plague in London. Plague pamphlets combined eyewitness reporting, moral exhortation, satire, and dark comedy — journalism before journalism existed. Thomas Dekker's The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) and A Rod for Run-Awayes (1625), Thomas Nashe's Christs Teares Over Iervsalem (1593), and Daniel Defoe's later A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) are landmarks of the form. Dekker's pamphlets are the genre's masterworks: vivid, satirical, humane, and written in prose that moves from pastoral lyricism to gallows humour within a single paragraph. F.P. Wilson's The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (1925) collects the major texts.
Kenning — A compressed metaphorical compound used in Old English and Old Norse poetry. The sea becomes the "whale-road" (hronrāde), the body becomes the "bone-house" (bānhūs), a sword becomes a "battle-light" (beadolēoma). Kennings do not merely decorate — they see through to the shape of a thing from an angle that plain speech cannot reach. The term is also one of the nine Teachings of Tianmu, where it denotes direct experiential understanding beneath words.
Morrice (also Morris Dance) — An English folk dance performed in groups with bells, handkerchiefs, and sticks, accompanied by a taborer (small drum and pipe player). The Morris tradition is documented from the fifteenth century onward; its origins are debated — the name may derive from "Moorish" or may be a corruption of another word entirely. By the Elizabethan period, Morris dancing was associated with May games, church ales, and popular festivity. William Kemp's Nine Daies Wonder (1600), in which he Morris-danced from London to Norwich, is the most vivid surviving account of the practice — complete with bells, a taborer named Thomas Slye, and crowds of thousands. The tradition survives in over a hundred active Morris sides in England today.
Scop (Old English) — The Anglo-Saxon poet-singer. A scop composed and performed heroic verse in the mead-hall, accompanying himself on the harp. The scop was both entertainer and cultural memory — the keeper of genealogies, legends, and the heroic code. In Beowulf, the scop sings of creation and of ancient battles, weaving the community's past into its present.
Devotion (in the tripartite sense) — A structured form of religious prose meditation pioneered by John Donne in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Each of the twenty-three "stations" of Donne's sickness follows a fixed tripartite structure: a Meditation (on the human condition as illuminated by the stage of the disease), an Expostulation (a debate with God, drawing on scripture, demanding answers), and a Prayer (submission to divine will). The form maps to the classical movements of the soul through affliction: observation, argument, surrender. No subsequent English writer adopted the structure, making the Devotions both a landmark and a dead end — a form so perfectly fitted to its author's crisis that it could not be borrowed. Meditation XVII, with its "No man is an island" and "never send to know for whom the bell tolls," is the most quoted passage in English devotional prose.
Expostulation (Latin: expostulātiō, "a demanding, a complaint") — In rhetoric and devotional writing, a formal remonstrance or demand for explanation addressed to God. Donne's twenty-three expostulations in the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) are the form's supreme example: in each, the sick man turns from meditation on his condition to direct confrontation with God, drawing on scripture as both weapon and shield, demanding to know why suffering exists and what it means. The expostulation is neither prayer (which submits) nor meditation (which observes) but argument — the creature standing before its creator and insisting on an answer. The form has biblical precedent in Job and the Psalms of lament, but Donne gives it a systematic place in a devotional structure: after observation, before surrender.
Ejaculation (Latin: ēiaculātiō, "a throwing forth") — In seventeenth-century devotional usage, a short, spontaneous prayer or cry to God — brief, heartfelt, and unpremeditated. George Herbert's subtitle for The Temple — "Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations" — signals the book's dual nature: crafted verse alongside spontaneous devotion. The word carried no sexual connotation in Herbert's time. Anglican and Catholic spiritual writers (Jeremy Taylor, Francis de Sales) prescribed ejaculatory prayer as a practice for laypeople: brief moments of communion woven into the fabric of ordinary life. Herbert's Temple embodies the practice — many poems read as ejaculations caught mid-flight and given form.
Perirrhanterium (Greek: περιρραντήριον, "aspergillum" or "lustral basin") — The subtitle Herbert gives to The Church-Porch, the long didactic poem (77 six-line stanzas) that opens The Temple. The word names the basin of holy water at a church entrance, used for ritual sprinkling before entering the sacred space. Herbert's title is a metaphor: the moral instruction of the porch prepares the reader for the sacred lyrics of The Church. The architecture of the book mirrors the architecture of a church — porch, church, militant church beyond — and the perirrhanterium is the threshold between the secular and the holy.
Shape Poem (also pattern poem, Latin: carmen figuratum) — A poem whose visual arrangement on the page depicts its subject. Herbert's "Easter Wings" (two wing-shaped stanzas that contract and expand) and "The Altar" (lines arranged to form an altar) are the most celebrated English examples. The tradition descends from Greek technopaignia (Simias of Rhodes, c. 300 BCE) through medieval Latin pattern poems. Herbert uses the form devotionally: the altar is built of words as stones are built into a structure, and the wings narrow at the soul's lowest point before expanding with redemption. The form fell out of favour after the metaphysical period but was revived by concrete poets in the twentieth century.
Colonial & Travel Writing Terms
Ingenio — The sugar processing works on a Caribbean plantation, from the Portuguese engenho and Spanish ingenio ("engine" or "device"). In Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), the ingenio is the central industrial mechanism: a vertical roller mill powered by horses or cattle that crushes the sugar canes, extracting juice that is then boiled, skimmed, cooled, and cured in a multi-room complex of grinding-room, boyling-room, filling-room, curing-house, and still-house. Ligon describes the entire process in exhaustive technical detail — the only such account from the mid-seventeenth-century English Caribbean.
Pickaroone (also Piccaroon, Picaroon) — A pirate or privateer, especially one operating along the coasts of Spain, North Africa, and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. From the Spanish picarón, "rogue." Ligon warns of "Prrats and Pickaronoves" along the Barbary Coast during his 1647 voyage. The word entered English through sailors' slang and appears in several early colonial accounts.
Beowulf — Key Terms
Geat (Old English Gēat) — A member of the Geatish people, a Germanic tribe inhabiting what is now southern Sweden (Götaland). Beowulf is a Geat — he crosses the sea to Denmark to aid Hrothgar, then returns to rule his own people for fifty years before dying in combat with a dragon. The historical fate of the Geats after the poem's events is uncertain; the poem hints at their impending destruction.
Grendel — The monster who haunts Heorot, Hrothgar's mead-hall, for twelve years, devouring warriors in the night. Described as a descendant of Cain — exiled from human fellowship, dwelling in the borderlands between the human world and something older and darker. Grendel is neither fully beast nor fully human. His terror is silence: he comes in the dark, and no weapon can bite him.
Heorot (Old English Heort, "Hart") — The great mead-hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Danes. The finest hall in the world — a place of feasting, gift-giving, and the recitation of poetry. Its name means "Hart" (stag). Grendel's assault on Heorot is an assault on civilization itself: the place where humans gather to be human, invaded by what refuses to be.
Hwæt — The opening word of Beowulf, traditionally translated as "Lo!" or "Listen!" A call to attention that signals the beginning of oral performance. Modern scholars debate whether it functions as an interjection or simply an emphatic discourse marker. Whatever its grammar, its effect is unmistakable: silence, please — the story begins.
Mead-Hall (Old English meoduheall) — The central social institution of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic culture. A large wooden hall where the lord hosted his retainers, distributed treasure, celebrated victories, mourned the dead, and heard the scop sing. The mead-hall was the physical embodiment of the comitatus bond — the mutual obligation between lord and warrior. To be exiled from the mead-hall was to be exiled from human society.
Wergild (Old English wergild, "man-payment") — The price set on a person's life, payable to their kin in compensation for their killing. A foundational principle of Germanic law: every person had a wergild determined by rank, and payment of the wergild could prevent a blood feud. In Beowulf, the failure to pay wergild or the impossibility of payment (as when Grendel refuses all terms) signals a breakdown of the social order that only violence can resolve.
Wyrd — Fate, destiny, the course of events as shaped by forces beyond human control. In Old English thought, wyrd is not predetermination but the weaving of what has already happened — the accumulated weight of the past pressing on the present. "Wyrd oft saves the undoomed man, when his courage holds" — even fate bends for the brave. The word survives in Modern English as "weird," though its original gravity has faded.
The Gawain Poet — Key Terms
The Green Knight — A gigantic figure who rides into King Arthur's court at New Year, entirely green — skin, hair, horse, and all — and challenges any knight to strike him with his own axe, on condition that the knight accept a return blow one year hence. When Gawain beheads him, the Green Knight picks up his own head and rides away laughing. He is later revealed to be Sir Bertilak de Hautdesert, transformed by Morgan le Fay's enchantment. The Green Knight embodies the testing of knightly virtue through the uncanny.
Pearl — A dream-vision elegy in which the narrator mourns a lost "pearl" — understood as a young daughter who died in infancy. In the dream, he sees her across a river in a heavenly landscape, radiant and crowned, and she instructs him in divine grace. The poem is one of the most technically accomplished in Middle English: 1, lines in 101 twelve-line stanzas, linked by concatenation (the last word of each stanza echoed in the first line of the next), the whole forming an almost-perfect circle.
Sir Gawain — Nephew of King Arthur, renowned in the Arthurian tradition as the model of courtesy and knightly virtue. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his virtue is tested through three temptations by Lady Bertilak and his final confrontation with the Green Knight. Gawain passes almost perfectly — his single failure (keeping a magical green girdle to save his life) becomes the poem's deepest teaching: that absolute perfection is impossible, and the honest acknowledgment of failure is itself a form of grace.
Bunyan & Nonconformist Allegory
Slough of Despond — A deep bog near the beginning of Christian's journey in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), into which the pilgrim sinks under the weight of his sins and fears. It is the first real danger he encounters after leaving the City of Destruction. Bunyan explains in a marginal note that the slough is fed by "the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin" — twenty centuries of sinners' tears draining into one marsh. The term entered common English as a metaphor for depression or despair, and appears in contexts from political commentary to clinical psychology.
Vanity Fair — A year-round market in the town of Vanity, through which all pilgrims to the Celestial City must pass, in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678). The fair sells "houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts." It was established by Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion at the beginning of time. Christian and Faithful are arrested there for refusing to buy, and Faithful is martyred. Thackeray took the name for his 1848 novel. The term has passed into common English as a designation for worldly frivolity and the marketplace of status.
Bede & Early English Christian Terms
Venerable Bede (c. 673–735 CE) — Anglo-Saxon monk, scholar, and historian at the twin monasteries of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria. Author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 CE), the single most important source for early English history. Bede established the dating system of Anno Domini (AD) in widespread use. His death song — five lines of Old English verse composed on his deathbed — is the earliest surviving English poem attributed to a named author.
Bede's Death Song (Old English Bēdes Dēaðsang) — A five-line poem in Old English composed by the Venerable Bede as he lay dying in May 735 CE. It meditates on the journey of the soul after death: before that necessary departure, no one is wiser than the man who considers, before his going-hence, what good or evil his soul will meet after death. The briefest and most personal poem in the Old English corpus — a scholar's entire theology compressed into five lines.
Cædmon's Hymn — The earliest datable poem in Old English, nine lines of alliterative verse praising God as creator. Preserved in Bede's Ecclesiastical History (IV.24), the hymn is attributed to Cædmon, an illiterate cowherd at the monastery of Whitby who received the gift of song in a dream. Bede's account of Cædmon's gift is the foundational origin story of English vernacular poetry — in his telling, the composition of verse in English is not merely a human craft adapted to Christian use but a divine gift called forth from the least likely vessel.
Gandharan Buddhism
Gandhari Prakrit (गान्धारी) — A Middle Indo-Aryan language once spoken in the ancient region of Gandhāra (modern eastern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan). Gandhari is the oldest attested language of Buddhist textual transmission, predating the Pali canon's written form. Written in the Kharoṣṭhī script from right to left, Gandhari Buddhist manuscripts date from the first century BCE to the third century CE — making them the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in any language. The British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments, acquired in 1994 from Hadda, Afghanistan, are among the most important.
Kharoṣṭhī (खरोष्ठी) — An ancient script used to write Gandhari Prakrit, derived from the Aramaic script and written from right to left. Used throughout the Gandhāra region from the third century BCE to the third century CE. The Kharoṣṭhī script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep from bilingual coins. All surviving Gandhari Buddhist manuscripts are written in Kharoṣṭhī on birch bark scrolls.
Pratyekabuddha (प्रत्येकबुद्ध, Gandhari: praceabudha) — "Solitary Buddha" or "Self-Awakened One." One who attains enlightenment independently, without a teacher, but does not establish a teaching community. In the Anavataptagāthā, encounters with pratyekabuddhas in past lives are a recurring catalyst for the elders' spiritual development. The pratyekabuddha ideal is particularly prominent in the earliest Buddhist literature and in Gandhari texts.
Anavataptagāthā (Gandhari: Aṇavadaghadha) — "Songs of Lake Anavatapta." A collection of testimonial verses in which Buddhist elders recount their past lives and the deeds that led to their awakening. The text is set at the supernatural Lake Anavatapta (Pali: Anotatta) in the Himalayas. Known from Sanskrit, Chinese (T. 200), and Tibetan recensions, the Gandhari version — British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragment 1 — is the oldest physical witness, dating to the first century CE.
Khaggavisāṇa Sutta (Pali; Gandhari: Khargaviṣāṇa Sutra) — "The Rhinoceros Sutra." A collection of verses praising the solitary wanderer who walks alone "like a rhinoceros horn." One of the oldest texts in the Buddhist canon, preserved in Pali (Sutta Nipāta 1.3) and in a Gandhari version on a British Library Kharoṣṭhī scroll. The Gandhari recension preserves unique readings, including verse 8's mahayaṇaṣa — potentially the earliest attestation of the word "Mahāyāna."
Manuscripts & Scholarly Apparatus
Nowell Codex (British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv) — The manuscript that preserves the only surviving copy of Beowulf. Named after Laurence Nowell, the sixteenth-century antiquarian who inscribed his name on the first page. The codex dates to around 1000 CE and also contains three prose works and the poem Judith. The manuscript was badly damaged in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731 — its edges scorched, portions of text lost forever. The Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin made two transcriptions before further deterioration, and modern conservation has stabilised the manuscript, but the fire remains the single greatest loss in the textual history of Old English literature.
Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index — The international classification system for folk tale types, originally developed by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne in 1910, revised by American folklorist Stith Thompson in 1928 and 1961, and comprehensively updated by German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004. The index assigns numerical identifiers to recurring narrative patterns found across world folklore: ATU 510A is Cinderella, ATU 300 is The Dragon-Slayer, ATU 330 is The Smith and the Devil. The English fairy tales collected by Joseph Jacobs include variants of dozens of ATU tale types, linking the English folk tradition to a vast international network of narrative.
Ballad Traditions
Barbara Allen (Child 84) — One of the most widely known traditional English ballads. A young man dies of love for the hard-hearted Barbara Allen, who relents too late and dies of grief in turn. The ballad's power lies in its emotional compression: an entire tragedy in a few stanzas, with no commentary and no narrator's judgment. Samuel Pepys called it "perfect."
Robin Hood — The legendary outlaw of English folklore, dwelling in the greenwood with his band of Merry Men, robbing the rich and aiding the poor. The Robin Hood ballads — including "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne," "Robin Hood and Allen-a-Dale," and "Robin Hood's Death and Burial" — form one of the great cycles of English popular literature. The earliest references date to the 14th century; the character has never left the English imagination.
Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58) — A Scottish ballad about a nobleman sent to sea on the king's errand in winter, who drowns with all his company. Celebrated for its stark, laconic narrative technique: the disaster is conveyed not through description but through the lords' hats floating on the water. One of the finest examples of ballad understatement — what is not said carries the weight.
The Twa Corbies (Child 26) — A Scottish ballad in which two crows (corbies) discuss a newly slain knight lying behind a dyke. His hawk, his hound, and his lady have all abandoned him; the crows will feast. A miniature of total desolation — the chivalric world stripped to carrion and indifference.
Folk Belief & the Fairy Tradition
Changeling — In English and wider European folk belief, a fairy child left in place of a stolen human baby. The changeling was typically described as sickly, wizened, or uncanny — crying incessantly, failing to thrive, or displaying behaviour alien to the human child it replaced. The belief functioned as an explanation for infant illness, developmental difference, and sudden personality change. Methods of "detecting" or "driving out" the changeling — exposure to fire, immersion in water, abandonment on a hillside — could be violent, and the historical record contains cases of real harm done to children under this belief. Diane Purkiss, in Troublesome Things (2000), argued that the changeling tradition should be understood as a grief technology — a way of processing the devastating reality of infant death in pre-modern communities.
Co-walker — In Scottish fairy belief, the spectral double or fetch that accompanies every person from birth. The Rev. Robert Kirk, in The Secret Commonwealth (1691), describes the Co-walker as "a reflex-man, a Co-walker, every way like the Man, as a Twin-brother and Companion, haunting him as his shadow." The Co-walker appears to friends at the moment of the original's death — eating at feasts, attending funerals — and is visible to those with the second sight. Kirk treats the Co-walker not as a demon but as a natural metaphysical phenomenon, "exuvious fumes of the Man" exhaled and congealed into visible likeness. The concept overlaps with the Norse fylgja, the Irish fetch, and the German Doppelgänger.
Cunning Folk — Men and women who practised healing, divination, counter-witchcraft, and the detection of stolen goods in English communities from the medieval period through the early twentieth century. They operated at the boundary between religion, medicine, and magic, and were the most widely consulted magical practitioners in early modern England. Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), estimated that there were more cunning folk per capita in Elizabethan England than there were clergymen. Owen Davies, in Popular Magic (2003), documented cunning folk practising into the 1940s.
Fairy Faith — The system of folk belief, attested across the British Isles from the medieval period to the twentieth century, that a parallel race of beings — variously called fairies, the Good People, the Fair Folk, the gentry — lived alongside humans in hills, mounds, and hollow places. The fairy faith is not a single coherent theology but a constellation of beliefs, stories, and practices: the fairy rade (the procession of fairies on certain nights), the changeling exchange, the fairy blast (sudden illness attributed to fairy hostility), the fairy doctor (a specialist in fairy-related ailments), and the taboos governing human interaction with the fairy world (do not eat their food, do not thank them directly, do not wear green). Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth (1691) and Katharine Briggs's A Dictionary of Fairies (1976) are the essential primary and secondary sources.
Fairy Rade — The procession or cavalcade of fairies, believed to ride out on certain nights of the year — especially Halloween (Samhain), Midsummer Eve, and May Eve. In Scottish and Northern English tradition, the fairy rade could be seen at crossroads and on hilltops, and a mortal who encountered it risked being carried away. The ballad of "Tam Lin" (Child 39) turns on the fairy rade: Janet rescues Tam Lin by pulling him from his horse as the fairy procession passes on Halloween night.
Familiar — In English witchcraft belief, a spirit or imp that attended a witch, carrying out her will and acting as intermediary with the devil. Familiars were most often imagined as small animals — cats, toads, hares, dogs, mice — though Nashe in The Terrors of the Night (1594) describes them as inhabiting every scale of creation, from the worms that eat through ships to the sparks in a flame. The Druids of the Isle of Man, he says, "had they but put their finger and their thumbe into their neck, they could haue pluckt out a whole neast of them." The concept was central to English witch-trial evidence: accused witches were searched for "teats" or supernumerary nipples at which their familiars were believed to suckle. The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) and the Chelmsford witch trials (1566) provide the key early modern documentation.
Folklore — A term coined by the English antiquarian William John Thoms in a letter to The Athenaeum on 22 August 1846, proposing "a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore — the Lore of the People" as a replacement for the Latin-derived "popular antiquities." The coinage was immediately adopted and entered every European language within a generation. The word names both the object of study (the traditions, beliefs, customs, and stories of a people) and the academic discipline that studies them.
Night Mare — An evil spirit or demon believed to sit upon the chest of a sleeper, producing a sensation of suffocation and terror. The word predates the modern sense of "nightmare" as a bad dream: the Old English mære (cognate with Old Norse mara) denotes a specific supernatural entity, not a psychological experience. Thomas Nashe in The Terrors of the Night (1594) preserves the original folk sense: "If wee bee troubled with too manie clothes, then we suppose the night mare rides vs." The night mare belongs to a widespread European tradition of oppressive sleep-spirits — the Norse mara, the German Alp, the Slavic mora — and was considered a genuine nocturnal assault until the rationalizing tendency of the eighteenth century reimagined the nightmare as a product of indigestion and melancholy. Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (1781) straddles both worlds, depicting an incubus squatting on a sleeping woman's chest.
Robin Goodfellow — A domestic fairy or hobgoblin of English folk tradition, also known as Puck. Robin Goodfellow helps with household chores at night — sweeping, churning, grinding corn — in exchange for a bowl of cream, but plays malicious tricks on those who offend him or fail to leave his offering. Shakespeare drew on this tradition for Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595). The name "Robin Goodfellow" is itself a euphemism — the "good" is propitiatory, intended to flatter a being whose nature was unpredictable and whose favour could not be taken for granted.
Second Sight (Scots Gaelic: An Dà Shealladh, "the two sights") — The involuntary ability to perceive events at a distance, see the spirits of the living and the dead, and observe the fairy world. The Rev. Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth (1691) is the most systematic early modern account of the faculty. Kirk describes it as natural rather than diabolical — an ability "affoording us a true account of any thing past, present, or to come" — and documents its inheritance patterns, its association with seventh sons, and the physical symptoms of its onset. Andrew Lang, in his 1893 introduction to Kirk, links second sight to the psychical research of his own era, noting the continuity of witness testimony across centuries.
Sleagh Maith (Scots Gaelic: Sluagh Maith, "the Good People") — The Scots Gaelic name for the fairies, used throughout the Rev. Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth (1691). Kirk describes them as "of a middle nature betwixt Man and Angel," dwelling in subterranean habitations within hills and mounds. They have "light changeable bodies" like condensed cloud, eat and drink, hold councils and funerals, change residence at the quarter days, and may be seen by those with the second sight. Kirk's account is distinctive in treating the Sleagh Maith as subjects for natural philosophical inquiry rather than objects of superstitious dread or theological condemnation.
Calendar Customs & Ritual Year
Hobby Horse (Obby 'Oss) — A folk-dramatic figure in which a performer wears a frame covered in cloth, with a carved horse's head, and dances through the streets, snapping at onlookers, collecting money, and enacting a stylised death and resurrection. The Padstow 'Obby 'Oss (performed on May Day in Cornwall) and the Minehead Hobby Horse (performed over three days beginning on May Eve in Somerset) are the most famous surviving English examples. The hobby horse tradition is attested across Europe and may represent one of the oldest continuous folk-dramatic forms in the English-speaking world.
Plough Monday — The first Monday after Twelfth Night, marking the beginning of the agricultural year in English folk custom. Farm labourers dragged a decorated plough through the village, soliciting money, food, and drink; those who refused risked having their gardens ploughed up. The custom is documented from the fifteenth century and survived in parts of eastern England into the twentieth. Plough Monday plays — folk dramas featuring costumed characters and a stylised death and resurrection — are among the simplest forms of English folk theatre.
Wassailing — A midwinter ritual of blessing the apple trees, practised on Twelfth Night (5 or 6 January) in the cider-producing regions of Somerset and Devon. The community processed to the orchard, sang to the oldest tree, poured cider on its roots, placed cider-soaked toast in its branches as an offering, and fired shotguns through the branches to drive away evil spirits. The word derives from the Old English wes hāl ("be whole" or "be well") and is cognate with the Norse toast ves heill. The custom survived into the twentieth century and has been widely revived.
Well-Dressing — The decoration of springs and wells with elaborate pictures made of flowers, seeds, bark, and other natural materials pressed into clay. The custom is documented from at least the seventeenth century in Derbyshire and has been practised continuously in Tissington since 1758. Well-dressing belongs to the wider tradition of sacred spring veneration — one of the most persistent pre-Christian practices in Britain, absorbed into Christianity through the dedication of wells to saints.
Supernatural & Early Colonial Terms
Lithobolia — Literally "stone-throwing," from Greek lithos ("stone") and ballein ("to throw"). The term denotes a poltergeist phenomenon in which stones and other objects are hurled by an unseen agent. Richard Chamberlain used it as the title of his eyewitness account Lithobolia: or, The Stone-Throwing Devil (1698), recording a three-month episode at Great Island, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1682. Witnesses included the Governor of West Jersey and the Deputy-Governor of Rhode Island. The case sits at the intersection of colonial land disputes, Puritan demonology, and the earliest American supernatural literature.
Corps-Candles (Canhwyllau Cyrph) — Mysterious lights observed in Wales before a death, believed to travel the path that the funeral cortege will later follow. John Aubrey devotes an entire chapter of Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects (1696) to the phenomenon, drawing on testimony from Welsh correspondents who describe small pale lights rising from houses where someone is about to die and proceeding along the road to the church. The size and number of lights was held to indicate the age and sex of the person to die — a small pale light for a child, a larger one for an adult, multiple lights for a family. Aubrey treats them as natural phenomena worthy of empirical study, consistent with his Royal Society methodology of collecting supernatural testimony in the same spirit as botanical or geological observation.
Corpusant — A luminous electrical discharge observed on ships' masts, rigging, and yardarms during thunderstorms, also known as St. Elmo's fire. The word derives from the Portuguese/Spanish corpo santo ("holy body"). Increase Mather in Remarkable Providences (1684) reports mariners seeing "three corpusants (as mariners call them) on the yards" during a thunderstorm at sea — phenomena that preceded a lightning strike which reversed the polarity of the ship's compass, a fact Mather presents as both divine wonder and natural-philosophical curiosity. Colonial seamen regarded corpusants as omens, sometimes favourable (the saint's protection) and sometimes ominous (the storm's intensification).
Day-Fatality — The seventeenth-century English belief that certain calendar days carry an inherent predisposition toward fortune or disaster. John Aubrey opens his Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects (1696) with an extensive catalogue of events occurring on specific dates — September 3rd, for example, accumulating the Irish rebellion (1641), Dunbar (1650), Worcester (1651), Cromwell's death (1658), and the burning of Northampton (1675). The concept derives from classical augury and astrological tradition but was given an empirical veneer by Aubrey and his contemporaries, who compiled historical events by date to identify patterns. Dr. John Pell contributed the Roman section of Aubrey's study. The practice sits at the boundary between superstition and the emerging statistical thinking of the Royal Society era.
Illustrious Providence — In Puritan theology, a demonstrable act of God's direct intervention in the physical world — a shipwreck survived, a lightning bolt that spares the righteous, a sinner struck dead at the moment of blasphemy. Increase Mather's An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684) is the definitive New England compendium of the genre, collecting supernatural events from across the colonies as empirical evidence of divine governance. The concept reflects the Puritan conviction that the natural world was a continuous sermon: every thunderstorm, every deliverance at sea, every apparition carried legible meaning. The recording of providences was understood as a duty — Mather's preface describes an organised programme of ministerial correspondence for this purpose, modelled on Matthew Poole's earlier English proposal.
Powaw — The colonial New England English spelling of the Algonquian word for a spiritual practitioner or ceremony (from Narragansett powwaw). In Increase Mather's Remarkable Providences (1684), powaws are referenced as Native practitioners to whom sick or troubled Indians resort, implicitly contrasted with Christian prayer. The word entered English through early colonial contact and eventually yielded the modern English "powwow," though the original sense — a person who mediates between the human and spirit worlds through chanting, drumming, and visionary experience — has been largely displaced by the modern sense of a council or gathering.
Venefical — From the Latin venefica ("witch" or "poisoner"), meaning "pertaining to witchcraft or sorcery." Used by Richard Chamberlain in Lithobolia (1698) to describe the stone-throwing phenomenon: "this venefical Operation." The word was archaic even in Chamberlain's time and signals his legal and learned background — he was a barrister of Gray's Inn before serving as Secretary of New Hampshire.
Familiar Spirit — In early modern English demonology, a supernatural entity — typically understood as a lesser demon — that served a witch by compact, appearing in various forms (animal, human, or invisible). The concept derives from the Vulgate's spiritus pythonicus and the biblical Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28), whose "familiar spirit" raised the shade of Samuel. English witch trials routinely asked the accused whether they possessed familiars; the term appears throughout Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), and the Witchcraft Act of James I (1604). The familiar was believed to require feeding — often on the witch's blood from a supernatural mark — and to carry out the witch's malefic purposes in exchange for the compact.
Fascination (Latin fascinātio, "bewitchment, enchantment") — In early modern witchcraft discourse, the power to bewitch or harm through the gaze, through speech, or through supernatural influence at a distance. The word descends from the Latin fascinum (a charm or spell, particularly one cast by the evil eye) and was used by demonological writers to describe the mechanism by which witches and demons exercised power over their victims. Richard Bovet, in Pandaemonium (1684), uses "fascinated" to describe those whose imaginations have been corrupted by demonic influence — Eve's "fascinated Off-spring" whose minds are "ready to receive as much of the infernal drug, as the Emperick of Hell prescribes them." The word has since lost its supernatural sense entirely, surviving only in the weakened modern meaning of "intensely interested."
Cambridge Platonists — A group of seventeenth-century English theologians and philosophers based at Emmanuel College and Christ's College, Cambridge, who sought to reconcile Christianity with the new natural philosophy by arguing that reason and faith were complementary. The principal figures were Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), and Henry More (1614–1687). More, the most prolific writer of the group, published Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653) — a founding text of English Christian Cabala, reading Genesis through a threefold literal, philosophical, and mystical interpretation — and contributed substantially to Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), writing the prefatory letter, the philosophical appendix on the nature of spirit, and annotations throughout. The Cambridge Platonists occupied a distinctive position in the witchcraft debate: they defended the reality of spirits not from credulity but from philosophical necessity, arguing that materialism led inevitably to atheism. Their engagement with the supernatural was part of a larger project to demonstrate that the universe contained more than matter in motion.
Drummer of Tedworth — The first major poltergeist investigation in English literature, documented by Joseph Glanvill in Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). In March 1661, John Mompesson of Tedworth, Wiltshire, confiscated a drum from a vagrant named William Drury, after discovering his military pass was forged. Within weeks, Mompesson's house was afflicted by persistent drumming, objects hurled by unseen hands, children lifted from their beds, and a "Sulphureous" stench. Glanvill investigated personally, witnessed phenomena including scratching noises that answered his questions with taps, and published the account. Drury was tried at Salisbury Assizes under the Witchcraft Act of James I and reportedly said "I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet till I have my Drum again." Skeptics (whom Glanvill called "modern Sadducees") spread false reports that both Glanvill and Mompesson had confessed the affair was a hoax — charges refuted by Mompesson's own letters published in the book. The case became the central battleground of the Restoration debate over the reality of spirits.
Pandaemonium (Greek: πᾶν, "all" + δαιμόνιον, "demon") — The capital of Hell and seat of Satan's council, coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667, I.756). Richard Bovet adopted the word as the title of his Pandaemonium, or the Devil's Cloister (1684), a collection of supernatural encounters from the English West Country and a theological argument for the reality of witchcraft and spirits. Bovet's book preserves fifteen first-person "Relations" of supernatural encounters — the Fairy-Boy of Leith, the Demon of Spraiton, spectral lights in Bristol — that survive nowhere else. The word entered common English as a synonym for wild uproar or chaos, losing its specific Miltonic architectural sense — a typical pattern in which a precisely imagined theological concept becomes a vague figure of speech.
Blockula — The witches' sabbath meeting-place in the Swedish witch trials of 1669–1670, as reported in the translated account included in Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). According to the confessions extracted at Mora, witches transported children through the air to Blockula, a meadow with a house and gate, where they feasted, danced, and pledged themselves to the Devil. The children described the journey in vivid detail: riding over churches and mountains on goats, sticks, or sleeping men, summoned by the Devil who appeared first as a man in grey or black. The Mora trials resulted in the execution of twenty-three adults and the punishment of fifteen children. The account was translated from German into English by Anthony Horneck, preacher at the Savoy.
Saducismus (Neo-Latin, from Hebrew Ṣaddūqī, "Sadducee") — The theological position that denied the existence of spirits, witches, and demonic activity, named by analogy with the Sadducees, the Jewish sect that denied the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:8). Joseph Glanvill coined the term in Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), his compendium of evidence for the reality of the spirit world. The word became a polemical label throughout Restoration England: to call someone a "modern Sadducee" was to accuse them of materialist atheism disguised as rational skepticism. Richard Bovet wrote Pandaemonium (1684) explicitly as "a further blow to modern Sadduceism," dedicating the work to Glanvill's legacy. The debate between the Sadducees and their opponents was the central intellectual controversy of late seventeenth-century English supernatural literature — the question being not merely whether ghosts exist but whether denial of spirits entails denial of God.
Witchmonger — A coinage by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), used throughout the treatise to describe those who propagate belief in witchcraft and profit from witch-persecution — inquisitors, pamphlet-writers, credulous magistrates, and the authors of demonological manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum. Scot uses the term as a deliberate inversion: the real malefactors are not the accused witches but those who manufacture and sustain the accusations. The word follows the pattern of English trade-compounds (ironmonger, fishmonger) and carries the implication that witch-belief is a commodity being sold.
Malleus Maleficarum — The "Hammer of Witches," a treatise on the prosecution of witches written by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer (Henricus Institor) and Jacob Sprenger in 1487. The most influential witch-hunting manual in European history, it codified the legal procedures, evidentiary standards, and theological justifications for torture and execution of suspected witches. Reginald Scot cites it throughout The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) as "M. Mal." — his primary target. Scot's Second Booke reproduces its own rules against it: children tortured to confess against their mothers, perjurers accepted as witnesses, advocates compelled to testify against their clients, and the catch-22 that a woman who endures torture without confessing is thereby proved to possess charms for silence (taciturnitie), justifying further torture. The Malleus went through at least twenty-eight editions between 1487 and 1669 and was used by both Catholic and Protestant courts.
Coosening — An Elizabethan term meaning "to cheat" or "to deceive," from the noun coosener (also cozener), a swindler or confidence trickster. Reginald Scot uses "coosening witches" in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) to describe fraudulent practitioners who claim magical powers to extort money from the credulous. Scot's central argument distinguishes between the impossible (genuine supernatural witchcraft, which he denies) and the criminal (fraud, which he acknowledges and condemns as a civil offence). The coosening witch is therefore not a supernatural agent but a petty criminal — a distinction that was legally radical in 1584.
Incubus and Succubus — In medieval and early modern demonology, demons believed to assume human form for sexual congress with mortals — the incubus (Latin incubare, "to lie upon") visiting women, the succubus visiting men. The theological mechanism, elaborated in the Malleus Maleficarum and attacked by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584, Books III–IV), held that the succubus collected seed from a man and the incubus delivered it to a woman, producing children — Merlin was alleged to be such an offspring. Scot's demolition is characteristically blunt: "the divell is a spirit, and hath neither flesh nor bones, which were to be used in the performance of this action." In Book IV, Scot identifies the incubus as a natural disease — "the mare" (sleep paralysis), caused by a "thicke vapor proceeding from the cruditie and rawnesse in the stomach" — and concludes the whole Book with Chaucer's verdict from the Wife of Bath's Prologue: "There nis none other Incubus but hee," meaning the friar himself.
The Mare — An Old English and Early Modern English term for the nocturnal oppression now called sleep paralysis — the sensation of a heavy weight upon the chest during sleep, accompanied by inability to move, cry out, or breathe. Reginald Scot, in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584, Book IV, Chapter 11), identifies the mare as the naturalistic explanation for the supposed visits of the incubus: "this Incubus is a bodilie disease.. which of some is called The mare, oppressing manie in their sleepe so sore, as they are not able to call for helpe." Scot prescribes turning onto one's side as "present remedie" and quotes a charm against it: "S. George, S. George, our ladies knight, / He walkt by daie, so did he by night." The word survives in modern English as "nightmare" — literally, the night-mare that rides you in your sleep.
Lycanthropia — In early modern demonology and medicine, the condition of being transformed into a wolf or believing oneself to be one. Reginald Scot, in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584, Book V), devotes six chapters to the subject, cataloguing the claims of Jean Bodin and the Malleus Maleficarum that witches could physically transform themselves and others into wolves, cats, asses, and mice. Scot demolishes each claim with characteristic patience, deploying scripture, Calvin, Hermes Trismegistus, and common sense — if a man were turned into an asse, would his asse-body be the temple of the Holy Ghost? His conclusion is medical: lycanthropia is a disease "proceeding partlie from melancholie," called by the ancient physicians Lupina melancholia or Lupina insania. The most memorable story in Book V is the Englishman of Cyprus, who was turned into an asse by eating enchanted eggs, served as a beast of burden for three years, and was finally restored after kneeling in devotion before a church — a tale Scot reproduces from the Malleus and then demolishes on every ground, including the practical objection that an English sailor would not have spoken Cypriot Greek.
Witches' Sabbath — The supposed nocturnal assembly at which witches were believed to gather, worship the Devil, feast, dance, and receive instructions for maleficium. Described in detail by Jean Bodin (De la Démonomanie des Sorciers, 1580) and the Malleus Maleficarum, the Sabbath narrative included ritual homage (kissing the Devil's buttocks), dancing to the chant "Har har, divell divell, danse here," anointing with unguents made from children's remains, and aerial flight on broomsticks. Reginald Scot, in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584, Book III), reproduces these accounts in methodical detail and then dismantles them point by point — showing that the confessions were extracted by torture, the physical claims were impossible, and the entire edifice served the interests of inquisitors and "witchmongers" rather than justice. The word "Sabbath" in this context is itself a piece of anti-Jewish demonology, borrowed from the Jewish Shabbat to imply a blasphemous inversion of sacred worship.
Veneficium — Latin for "poisoning" or "sorcery by poison," from venenum (poison) and facere (to make). Central to Reginald Scot's argument in Book VI of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Scot demonstrates that the Hebrew Chasaph in Exodus 22:18 — "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" — was rendered by the Septuagint as Greek pharmakeia and by Latin translators as veneficium, both meaning poisoning rather than supernatural witchcraft. The Lex Cornelia, the Roman anti-poisoning statute, confirms the sense: the prohibition targets those who make, sell, or possess deadly poison. Scot's etymological argument is the theological foundation of his entire case against witch-persecution: the English word "witchcraft" is a mistranslation that has condemned innocent people to death.
Chasaph — The Hebrew word appearing in Exodus 22:18 and Deuteronomy 18:10, conventionally translated as "witchcraft" in the English Bible. Reginald Scot devotes the opening chapter of Book VI of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) to its proper meaning, marshalling Josephus, the Rabbinical tradition, and the Septuagint to demonstrate that Chasaph signifies veneficium — poisoning and fraud — not supernatural power. Moses, Scot argues, prohibited four categories of impostor: Praestigiatores (illusionists), Mecasapha (poisoners), practitioners of Kasam, Onen, Ob, Idoni (divination), and Habar (mumblers of secret words). None of these are the old women accused of riding broomsticks to the Sabbath.
The Flower Witch Trial (1619)
Forspoken — An archaic English term meaning "bewitched" or "enchanted," from the verb forspeake ("to bewitch by speaking"). In The Wonderfull Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1619), Anne Baker is asked whether a child was "forspoken or no" — that is, whether illness had been caused by spoken witchcraft. The term reflects the oral dimension of early modern witchcraft belief: the witch's power resided in her words, her curses, her incantations. To be "forspoken" was to be struck by maleficent speech. The word survives in Scots dialect into the twentieth century.
Moldiwarp — A dialectal English term for a mole (Talpa europaea), from the Old English moldwyrpe ("earth-thrower"). In the Flower pamphlet (1619), Joan Willimot gives Ellen Greene two familiars: "one in the likenesse of a Kittin, and the other of a Moldiwarp." The moldiwarp-familiar was named "hiffe, hiffe" and dispatched to bewitch Anne Dawse to death. The word was common in Northern English and Scots dialect through the nineteenth century; Shakespeare uses it in 1 Henry IV (III.i.147), where Hotspur mocks the moldiwarp prophecy.
North Berwick Witch Trials & Scottish Legal Terms
Bootes (also boots) — A Scottish instrument of judicial torture consisting of a frame of boards or iron fitted around the lower legs, into which wooden wedges were driven by mallet-blows, progressively crushing the bones and flesh. Newes from Scotland (1591) describes Doctor Fian receiving the boots until "his legges were crushte and beaten togeather as small as might bee, and the bones and flesh so brused, that the bloud and marrowe spouted forth in great abundance, whereby they were made unseruiceable for euer." The boots were used throughout the Scottish witch trials and remained a legal instrument in Scotland until their abolition after the Glorious Revolution.
Fore Crag — A Scots term for the front of the throat or the area below the chin. In Newes from Scotland (1591), the Devil's mark on Geillis Duncane "was found in her fore crag or foreparte of her throate." The pamphlet glosses the Scots term for its English readership, indicating awareness that the London audience would not know the word.
Iewes Trump (also Jew's Trump, Jew's harp) — A small plucked metal instrument held against the teeth, producing a buzzing tone modulated by the player's mouth cavity. In Newes from Scotland (1591), Geillis Duncane plays "a small Trump, called a Iewes Trump" to lead the witches' dance at North Berwick Kirk. King James commanded her to play the same tune before him at court. The instrument's association with folk music and dancing made it a natural prop in the pamphlet's depiction of the witches' sabbath.
Pilliwinckes (also pilliwinks, pinniwinks) — A Scottish instrument of torture applied to the fingers, functioning as a thumbscrew or finger-press. In Newes from Scotland (1591), Geillis Duncane is tormented "with the torture of the Pilliwinckes vpon her fingers, which is a greeuous torture." The word is of uncertain etymology but is attested in Scottish legal records from the fifteenth century onward. The pilliwinks were commonly used alongside the rope and the boots as a graduated sequence of coercion.
Reill (also reel) — A Scottish folk dance, performed in a line or circle. In Newes from Scotland (1591), the witches at North Berwick Kirk "daunced this reill or short daunce" while singing their chant. The pamphlet uses the Scots word and then glosses it as "short daunce" for the English reader. The reel remains a living tradition in Scottish folk dancing.
Riddle (also ciue, sieve) — In Scottish witch-trial testimony, a sieve or riddle used as a vessel for sailing. In Newes from Scotland (1591), the witches go to sea "each one in a Riddle or Ciue, and went in the same very substantially with Flaggons of wine making merrie and drinking by the waye." The image of witches sailing in sieves appears across European witch literature; its presence in the North Berwick confessions reflects the standard demonological repertoire of the period.
Thrawing (Scots: thraving) — A form of judicial torture in which the head was bound and twisted with a rope or cord. In Newes from Scotland (1591), Agnis Sampson "had all her haire shauen of, in each parte of her bodie, and her head thrawen with a rope according to the custome of that Countrye, beeing a paine most greeuous, which she continued almost an hower." The thrawing of the head was a distinctively Scottish practice, not commonly used in English courts.
Turkas — A Scottish word for pincers or pliers, used as an instrument of torture. In Newes from Scotland (1591), Doctor Fian's fingernails "were riuen and pulled off with an instrument called in Scottish a Turkas, which in England wee call a payre of pincers, and vnder euerie nayle there was thrust in two needels ouer euen up to the heads." The pamphlet's glossing of the Scots term for its English audience is characteristic of the text's awareness of its cross-border readership.
Ady's Anti-Persecution Argument (1661)
Cunning Man (also Cunning Woman, Wizard, Conjurer) — In Early Modern English usage, a folk practitioner consulted by ordinary people for magical services: finding lost goods, identifying thieves, diagnosing bewitchment, or providing counter-charms. Thomas Ady, in A Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661), argues that the cunning man is the true danger — not the accused old woman, but the impostor who identifies her as a witch, collects a fee, and sets the machinery of persecution in motion. Ady's fifteenth cause of the persistence of witch-belief names the cunning man directly: "Another abominable cause is the suffering of Impostors to live, such as silly people call Cunning men, who will undertake to tell them who hath bewitched them." The cunning man corresponds to Ady's Scriptural definition of the witch: a deceiver who leads the people from God, not a being with supernatural power.
Python (Hebrew: Ob; Greek: Pythō) — In Ady's sustained exegesis in A Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661), the Biblical term conventionally translated as "familiar spirit" or "witch." Ady demonstrates that Ob properly means "a bottle" — referring to the trick of speaking from a hollow vessel or underground cavity to simulate the voice of the dead, used by priestly impostors at oracle-houses. The "Witch of Endor" was not a being with supernatural power but a Mulier Pythone praedita — "a woman skilled in the craft of oracling" — who deceived Saul through ventriloquism and confederacy. Ady traces the term through the Septuagint, Plutarch, and Beza to prove that all Biblical witchcraft amounts to imposture, not supernatural agency.
The Dilemma — The twenty devastating questions with which Ady opens Book One of A Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661), challenging any defender of witch-prosecution to show Scriptural warrant for the practice. The questions demand proof from the Bible that witches can make pacts with the Devil, keep suckling imps, bear witch-marks, fly through the air, kill by supernatural means, or transform themselves. No answer is given because none exists. Ady's Dilemma is the structural heart of his argument: the entire edifice of witch-hunting has no foundation in the text it claims as authority.