Unusual Zeal, Touch Tests and Spectral Evidence
Matt Goldish · 2024
John Gaule (ca. 1603–1687) was a seventeenth-century English minister whose book, Selected Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1646; consulted during the Salem trials), was directed largely against Matthew Hopkins, England’s “witch-finder general” during the Civil War. 1 There, almost half a century before the Salem trials, Gaule speaks about the necessity for perspicacity and scientific acumen among clergy or magistrates hunting witches.