“She also learned from the books ‘the manner of the fits of Mr. Throckmorton’s children’ and set about about imitating them.  It has long been suspected that trial pamphlets and and similar literature helped spread ideas on witchcraft, but such striking evidence of so direct a connection between a printed account of one case and what happened in another is very rare.” (8)

It’s very easy to forget, especially in a day and age in which one can simply type “witchcraft” and be met by literally millions of documents within a matter of seconds, the scarcity of and also the engagement with which a person would’ve approached any given document at the time.  Today, even just sitting back and idly skipping through things, we go through hundreds of pages of reading every week.  For Anne and her family, however, a gifted copy of a book on witchcraft might well have been the only new piece of literature for quote some time with which to meet the boredom of daily life, as well as, as we’ve seen, its necessities.  It’s so fascinating to see the massive changes that come from such seemingly trivial dispersals of information.  Before the printing press, there would have been a massive rift between the secretive and esoteric knowledge of witchcraft kept by figures of authority and the simple, folk and word of mouth-based conceptions a commoner would have held.  As we see important, high-sphere tales and events such as trial transcriptions and histories being dispersed to more and more people, there is as well present a real shifting of power.  Anne, her father, and the the Kirfootes are able to take their supposed witchcraft case all the way to the king.  In a way, this expresses the opportunity that information brings, and its equalizing effect to a certain degree.  Anne and Brian Gunter, in a strange and roundabout enough way, really learned an entirely new trade with they new knowledge: that of witchcraft exploitation.  The information bestowed upon them by these however limited sources granted them a social, economic, and even political power almost unheard of hitherto.