1612: Defence of Medical Expertise
The main subject of Cotta's Discoverie is the increasing presence of charlatans in the medical profession and this is why witchcraft holds a modest place therein. As Sona Rosa Burstein has shown, Cotta is not the first to attack illegitimate practitioners of medicine.
During the reign of Elizabeth, William Clowes (a physician in her service) denounced healers without medical knowledge in A Briefe and necessarie Treatise touching the cure of the disease called Morbus Gallicus (1585)11 and the year before, Reginald Scot, a Kentish gentleman who wrote a very sceptical defence of witches, had more generally denounced all sorts of “couseners” in matters of magic and witchcraftd2 With the accession of9 See F. V. White, odnb.
10 Julius Caesar Scaliger was a reputed humanist scholar and physician who wrote a very polemical commentary of Cardano's De Subtilitate, entitled Exotericarum exercitationum liber quintus decimus de subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Paris, 1557), in which he cruelly mocked Cardano's lack of methodological rigour and sometimes fanciful explanations.
11 Sona Rosa Burstein, “Demonology and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, Folklore 67:1 (1956) 19. Clowes denounced all the quacksalvers and charlatans as “Thessalus retinue or Disciples” (f°8r).
12 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584).
James Stuart, several trials of witchcraft or possession cases were discovered as fraud, including by the King himself.
A Discoverie is divided into three books. The first two list the illegitimate types of healers, while the third describes the “true artist”. Book one focuses on the different types of practitioners who cannot be true physicians for want of learning: the Empirics who rely only on experience (chap. 2), women (because unfit for learning) (chap.
3), quacksalvers (chap. 4), surgeons (chap. 5), apothecaries (chap. 6), “practisers by spels” (who use charms to heal) (chap. 7), wizards (meaning wisemen and wisewomen) (chap. 9), and physicians’ helps when they decide to set their own practice. The second book attacks the learned practitioners who are more interested in “gayne” than in the patient’s health, among whom methodians, astrologers, conjectors by urine (whom he equates with augurers) but also the clergy. And the latter are openly attacked as worst offenders:diuers Astrologers, but especially Ecclesiasticall persons, Vicars and Parsons, who now ouerflow this kingdome with this alienation of their owne proper offices and duties, and vsurpation of others, making their holy calling a linsey wolsey, too narrow for their minds, and therefore making themselues roome in others affaires, vnder pretence of loue and mercie.[1114] [1115] The question of witchcraft is treated in chapter 8, entitled “The explication of the true discouerie of witchcraft in the sicke, together with many and wondered instances in that kind”. The fact that it does not denounce any type of practitioner, but triggers a reflection on discerning natural and demonic diseases, as well as the fact that it is much longer than any other chapter in the book, might actually be evidence of its being a later addition^4 due to the immediate context of the Northampton witch trial on July 22nd. The discussion of witchcraft thus appears as a digression, aiming “to moderate the generall madnesse of this age, which ascribeth vnto witchcraft whatsoeuer falleth out vnknowne or strange vnto a vulgar sense,”[1116] [1117] [1118] [1119] [1120] and beyond to insist on the merits of the learned physician, the only expert capable of discerning the symptoms of witchcraft correctly: “it requireth the learned, and not learned in word and superficiall seeming, but indeed truly iudicious and wise.”i6 If Marion Gibson and Peter Elmer are right in thinking that Cotta was treating Elizabeth Belcher (one of the supposed victims of the Northampton witch trial),i7 then the scepticism of his conclusions is only logical. For Cotta, this gentlewoman was not a victim of witchcraft but of diverse natural diseases, and he further resolved that although the witch's confession was sufficient evidence for her execution because she made herself guilty of being the devil's associate, it was not so for the existence of witchcraft. But do we find in A Discoverie “a highly sceptical” Cotta, as described by Peter Elmer, who was “echoing the views of leading Puritan gentlemen in the county”?i8 Although in some places Cotta displays scorn for beliefs in witchcraft or “inchanted spells” that he discards as “superstitious babling”,i9 his scepticism must not be exaggerated, as he always leaves an open door for the devil's intervention. In fact, his position might be seen as being half way between Weyer's and Erastus'. Those two physicians denied witches any real supernatural power, but while for Weyer this made the witches victims of the devil to be pardoned and helped, for Erastus they were guilty of striking a pact with the devil and therefore had to be executed for apostasy and heresy. Likewise Cotta privileges the devil's power over the witches', making “snares for the innocent, whose destruction is his intention.”[1121] His position should therefore be seen as a mildly, rather than a highly sceptical one: I do not deny nor patronage witches or witchcraft, but wish that the proofes and triall thereof may be more carefully and with better circumspection viewed and considered...21