Modernising Scottish witchcraft texts

Refereed online journal; issue on ‘Renaissance Renegotiations'. The article follows from Normand and Robert's experience of editing literary and non-literary texts from a sixteenth-century witch-hunt, in their Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James's ‘Demonology' and the North Berwick Witches (2000). It theorises the editing involved in turning the forms of textuality of 16C texts into a readable 21C book, while trying to preserve their specific historical identity, and the signs of their initial production and context. Textual variants and modernising from Scots into English are among the factors explored to account for the artificial language that such an edition ends up producing.