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Thomas Heywood writes quite extensively about witches in his Gynaikeion (1624), which is a kind of encyclopaedia of lore, stories and prejudices about women. It is available on the EEBO website, which you access via Metalib. In the penultimate book he considers women as witches (pp399-400). He has read the Malleus Maleficarum, and alongside Sprenger, his next favourite source is Jean Bodin. In other words, he uses the most savagely convinced sources. Heywood also candidly admits that his other main source for stories about witches is anecdotes that he has been told.

The prose work comes ten years before his collaboration on the witchcraft play, The Late Lancashire Witches. Reading the play in the light of the earlier discussion of witchcraft, we can see that both texts are fascinated with shape-shifting witches, and the power of witches to travel at amazing speeds. The interest in shape-shifting extends to stories of victims of witchcraft having an animal shape imposed upon them (men transformed into asses, etc). Here is the genesis of the scene of Mistress Generous riding Robin. Heywood also tells stories of witches suffering injury in their shape-shifted form, which then makes obvious their involvement in witchcraft when they revert to human form. Thus a sentry in Brill shoots at the sky when he hears women's voices above him, an old woman is then found, wounded in the buttocks, who has to confess to witchcraft.

Heywood shows interest in the sexual aspects of witchcraft. He insists that he knows an English Gentleman (he will not name him), who lived for years with a female spirit, and tells a story of a villager who finds out that his wife is a witch. Not featured in our play is Heywood's insistence that witches who have had carnal relations with the devil have thereafter a sulphurous smell.

Heywood also asserts, and this is counter to the play, that witches cannot benefit themselves by witchcraft, and are therefore always poor and foul. In the play, the witches use their charms for recreational purposes, and are of various ages and attractiveness. Heywood also proposes a diabolic aspect to the cures offered by witchcraft: a witch, he insists, can only cure by transferring the affliction, from animal to animal, or from one human to another. Here is another aspect of the demonologists' assault on the tradition of 'cunning folk' or 'wise women'.