confession, but they that have infected the mindes of common people with such devillish doctrins? This insight anticipates psychological study of those who are 'acting under a description' (in the analysis offered by Ian Hacking). Ady writes like a typical 17th century intellectual: a contemporary reader can feel intellectually bludgeoned as his arguments mount up (he really does reach as far as a "sixteenthly"). The third part attacks contemporary writers on witchcraft and demonology. Ady suggests the book Daemonologie attributed to King James was ghostwritten by the Bishop of Winchester. He also disagrees strongly with Thomas Cooper ("a bloody persecutor of the poor"), author of the book The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617) and with William Perkins's Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608), calling it "a collection of mingled notions" from Jean Bodin, Bartolommeo Spina, and "other popish blood suckers" who wrote "great volumes of horrible lies and impossibilities." Perkins was a very distinguished puritan divine: Ady ingeniously suggests that this posthumously published work by the great man was erroneously put into print, and was actually Perkins' notes for a refutation of witchcraft belief. Ady also corrects John Gaule (author of Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), making a personal exhortation to the cleric to renounce his errors, and Mysmatia, the Mag-astromancer (1652)). George Gifford (author of A Discourse of the Subtle Practices of Devils by Witches and Sorcerers (1587) and A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593) is more gently treated, as having more "spirit of truth" in him than many of his (clerical) profession). The scholar and librarian George Lincoln Burr called A Candle in the Dark "one of the bravest and most rational of the early protests". Quotes I will speak of one man ... that went about in King James his time ... who called himself, the Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus tabantus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currently without discovery (Thomas Ady, "A Candle in the Dark", 1655). This quote from "A Candle in the Dark" was used an epigraph to Dan Chapman's 2014 novel, "Closed Circuit". The Doctrine of Devils Ady's third publication on witchcraft was published anonymously in 1676. It is a