The decades at the beginning of the seventeenth-century were an especially rich period for predominance of this dichotomy: Galileo Galilei was active at this time, defending the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1628, William Harvey published his treatise on the circulation of the blood yet in 1634, twenty women were convicted in the county of Lancashire, England, for apparent witchcraft, and even when their accuser “confessed his hoax”, the government kept the “witches” in jail for fear of public uprising (Barber, 1979). Regardless of the new scientific advances, people continued to believe in the existence of witches, their verbal pacts with the devil, and their consequent desire to adversely affect human health and relationships. Since the demise of witch persecution in the eighteenth-century, Renaissance witchcraft scholars have been unendingly intrigued by the notion that two inherently distinct epistemologies - demonology and rational science - could coexist in one period of time.
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