First edition of this scarce, most interesting early English work on witchcraft, possession and exorcism, attributed to the northern English secret press. John Darrell (1562-c1602) was a Puritan clergyman, notorious for his practice of exorcism in Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire. This led to a public investigation, the prosecutor, Samuel Harshnet (1561-1631), being then Archbishop of York. Harshnet decried Darrell’s practices in print in his ‘Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of John Darrell’ (1599); there he unmasked as fraud specific cases of possession in which Darrell employed exorcism on people feigning possession – a ‘Popish’ practice – to impress the populace and make them submit more willingly to the Puritan creed. Darrell’s ‘Detection’ was his answer to these accusations, and one of several works published as part of this debate. The more noteworthy case was that of William Somers (Nottingham, 1596-7), allegedly in cahoots with Darrell. ‘Detection’ sought to counterattack Harshnet’s work one sentence at a time, meanwhile providing his own detailed reconstruction and interpretation of the events which had occurred in several places in the north of England in the late 1590s. He clarified the role of his assistant, George More, and his relationship with some of his hosts and the possessed like Thomas Starkey, Thomas Darling, Katherine Wright, and Mary Glover. Darrell also included extensive explanations of Puritan exorcism, its practice, its difference from Popish practices, and the kind of people more likely to require such rituals (‘commonly of the poorer sort’). In order to disentangle Puritan practices from Popish ones, and undo Harshnet’s accusations, Darrell asked ‘why was so much official time and energy being directed against the activities of ministers of the gospels [i.e., Puritans] […] and not deployed to root out and denounce Catholic exorcism’ instead, as the culprits of the latter had never, unlike Darrell, been arrested and imprisoned (Holmes, p.78). A scarce work – a most interesting snapshot of the effects of early witchcraft inquests within small communities caught between Puritanism and Catholicism, in late Tudor England.
