In encyclopedia entries Reginald Scot is typically credited with a set of obscure "firsts." He wrote the first tract on hop farming in English, introducing Flemish methods of hop cultivation to Kent. He also wrote the first discourse on witchcraft and conjuring tricks in English, exposing the illusions of supernatural phenomena and the cruelties of Elizabethan witch trials in a vast, skeptical, and humane treatise. The obscurity of these distinctions somewhat belies Scot's character as a pragmatic man of business and a keen critic of Elizabethan laws and religion. His Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) had an impressively broad influence on English society, attracting the attention of theologians, judges, doctors, playwrights, and even King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) and initiating a critique of supernatural events that would flourish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The son of Richard Scot and Mary Whetenall, Reginald (or Reynold...