[WEBSTER, JOHN]. The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft. Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and Divers persons under a passive Delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a Corporeal League made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, or that he sucks on the Witches Body, has Carnal Copulation, or that Witches are turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the Existence of Angels and Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirit, the force of Charms, and Philters; with other abstruse matters. London: Printed by J. M. [Jonas Moore] and are to be sold by the booksellers in London, 1677.
FIRST EDITION. Leather-bound; hardcover; folio in 4s (290 x 190 x 25 mm); pp. [16], 346, [4]. English text. Finely bound in 19th-century gilt-decorated dark blue crushed full morocco (by Fleming Bookbinder, Glasgow); all page edges gilt; marbled endpapers; imprimatur leaf present before title; decorative head-piece; printed sidenotes. Condition: VERY GOOD. Collated complete. Binding tight and secure with some trivial rubbing to extremities. Minor loss to outer margins of imprimatur and title-page. Small rust hole to fourth preliminary leaf, and also to a2 and a3. Occasional light dust-soiling and spotting. Bottom right corner of Kk neatly repaired. A few old annotations in pencil. Minor fraying to final leaf. Residue of removed bookplate to front pastedown, and later bookseller's printed description mounted to verso of first blank leaf. A most attractive copy. NLM/Krivatsy 12612; Wing W-1230; Norman 2191; ESTC R12517.
Notes: Rare first edition of The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, a treatise by former Parliamentarian chaplain, medical practitioner and natural philosopher John Webster (1611–1682), in which he argues for the impossibility of demonic intervention in the world, based on the belief that all the phenomena supposedly providing evidence for this could be explained by natural means. The work takes issue with those of his contemporaries who sought scientific and philosophical support for belief in witchcraft. He did not deny altogether the existence of the supernatural but attacked the more extravagant reports of the powers of witches and "the truth of apparitions, the nature of astral and sidereal spirits, the force of charms and philters ... [and] other abstruse matters". During the Civil War and Interregnum, Webster had been a notorious radical, responsible for one of the most telling critiques of the universities in his Examination of Academies (1654). After the Restoration however, Webster conformed and took up medical practice in Lancashire while also conducting various intellectual pursuits, including Helmontian chemistry. In 1671 he published his Metallographia, or, an History of Metals, a work which sought to understand the nature of mineral deposits and metallurgical processes along predominantly Helmontian lines. By this time, he had evidently already begun work on The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, a substantial book on the rationale, both scriptural and natural philosophical, of witchcraft.
