Thirty-five years before this chapter was completed, Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) redefined early modern folklore studies. Since he wrote, a greater respect for the texts of non-elite culture has become standard; and more recently, Ronald Hutton has asked for historians to pay more attention to the deposits of folkloric evidence patiently collected by specialist and local societies. Though a number of mantraps lie hidden in the fairy woods of folkloric scholarship, this challenge ought to be taken up by literary critics too. This chapter considers anonymous, collectively written texts which had a prophylactic or magical meaning, and stories or descriptions concerning local landmarks and natural phenomena, both of which have traditionally been seen as the province of the folklorist; but since they are also formal generic constructions, they repay literary attention. They are, too, often Catholic texts – or were once. But this chapter is concerned less with individual scraps of folklore than with early modern Englishmen's attitudes towards folklore as a whole, and with setting out how Protestants defined it as popish.

This emphasis on English Protestants reflects the fact that more material on this topic survives from their pens than from those of post-Reformation English Catholics.