The Unjustness of the Witch Trials

Bertrand Russell: Spie was led to this reasonable surmise only after a skeptical friend, the Duke of Brunswick, had a woman suspected of witchcraft artfully tortured and interrogated in his presence. This poor woman testified that she had seen Spie himself on the brocken, shape shifting into a wolf, a goat, and other beasts. Like them, he confessed his guilt, and in 1589 he was strangled and then burnt. As late as 1718, just as the inoculation against smallpox was being introduced in England, an English mathematician Brooke Taylor was making refinements to the calculus.