As witch-hunting fever swept Europe in the 16th century, an exuberant dog and a suspicious vicar nearly had Margaret Simons, a housewife, burnt at the stake.

The dog had barked at the vicar’s son, who drew a knife and chased it home. The next day the boy fell ill and his father at once suspected the dog’s owner of possessing evil powers. He had Mrs Simons, of Kent, tried for witchcraft, but she escaped death because the jury could not agree on her guilt.

Her case, and others like it, are highlighted in a rare book published in 1584, a copy of which was found recently in the attic of a house in Nottinghamshire. The author, Reginald Scott, an engineer and surveyor who became the MP for New Romney, took a remarkably enlightened view of witchcraft in an era of ignorance and superstition: he argued that it simply didn’t exist.

The volume is expected to fetch at least £5,000 when it is auctioned by Bonhams in London next week.

In an outburst of radical thinking in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Scott maintained, against the prevailing belief of the time, that there were no witches in contemporary England, and that hundreds of women executed for the so-called crime were innocent.

He cited the case of the unfortunate Mrs Simons, of Brenchley, who was tried at Rochester Assizes in 1581 on the testimony of John Ferrall, the parish vicar. Scott interviewed him after the trial. He wrote: “He was unable to make as good account of his faith as she whom he accused.” His son, thought Scott, was “an ungracious boie”.

When the boy fell ill, Ferrall blamed witchcraft. He also blamed Mrs Simons for striking him dumb in church. “And trulie,” Scott records, “if one of the Jurie had not been wiser than the others, she had been condemned to death thereupon, and on other ridiculous matters as this.”

Unexplained deaths of infants, which would now be called cot deaths, were enough for the mother to be burnt as a witch. Even a prominent birthmark was often taken as a sure sign of witchcraft. Most confessions of witchcraft were extracted by torture, Scott argued.

The assertion that witches were incestuous adulterers who boiled infants after murdering them until their flesh was made potable was untrue, incredible and impossible, Scott said. He also ridiculed other bizarre notions, especially cures for impotence, which included inhaling the smoke of a dead man’s tooth, anointing the sufferer’s body with the gall of a crow or, worst of all, “fill a quill with quick silver and put into your owne bottome”.

Matthew Haley, books and manuscripts specialist at Bonhams, said: “Scott’s book is remarkably erudite as well as being out of step with much thinking of the day.”

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist