Reformed theology seeped into the consciousness of the Scottish people, who increasingly came to view the Devil as a tool by which God inflicted the punishment of evil on the unjust—a material being conspiring always to corrupt them. Chapter three would tell the story of how rising paranoia about the Devil’s physical presence in Scotland fueled the witch hunts of the 1590s, leading to the deaths of more than two thousand people, mostly women. That was not even the worst part. The little research I’d done so far showed that many of the accused, like Isobel Gowdie, had refused to reject their
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