This volume presents, for the first time, a critical edition of the works of the early modern English physician John Cotta. No mere country doctor, Cotta spoke out eloquently and courageously against what he saw as abuses in medicine and injustices in the prosecution of witchcraft. Read by important thinkers such as Robert Burton in England, and by colonial administrators in New England, Cotta helped shape two of the most important debates of his time. Included are the full texts of Cotta’s Short Discovery and The Trial of Witchcraft, both books painstakingly edited and annotated. Also included is a detailed introduction dealing with Cotta’s medical and religious contexts, his extensive learning and much more.

Examines legal thought and practice from the later middle ages through to the middle of the seventeenth century.

At the end of June 1860, the great and good of Britain’s intellectual establishment gathered in Oxford for the annual jamboree of the Association for the Advancement of Science. Only six months after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the stage was set and the characters in place for the mother of all donnybrooks. But for all the posturing and opinionating about the nature of evolution, the exchanges held massive and broader implications for social authority and established control in a changing world. Although taking place over 150 years ago, the Oxford debate still inflames the same passions today and continues to set the defining terms for the struggle between science and religion. As such, this book is as much a pertinent contribution to today’s cultural wars as it is a convincing historical record.