Reginald Scot went further than any writer of his century in English. Johann Weyer had argued that the women in the dock were incapable of the crime. Scot argued that nobody was capable of it, because there was no such crime. The powers ascribed to witches, he held, belong to God alone, and to credit a village woman with them is not merely cruel but close to blasphemy.
Having removed the crime, he had to explain the trials, and his explanation is close to the one modern historians give. Misfortune arrives, a household needs a cause, and suspicion settles on the poorest and least protected neighbour, usually an old woman who has begged and been refused and has muttered on the way out. Once the accusation is made the process supplies the rest. A frightened defendant confronted with a confident court, held, questioned repeatedly and told what is already known about her, will often agree, and her agreement is then read as proof.
Scot was a country gentleman who had sat in parliament, not a theologian, and his opponents made much of that. What he had instead was a close eye for how people are actually persuaded, and a willingness to say that respectable men in wigs were killing harmless women over nothing. In 1584 that was an extraordinary thing to put in print in English, and most of what he concluded has held.