In 1657, Katherine Kerse, a resident of Edinburgh, was brought before the authorities to face formal accusations of witchcraft. While the surviving documentation of her case remains restricted to a procedural listing within the Scottish Record Office—catalogued as C/EGD/232—the inclusion of Katherine in these official legal registers marks her as one of the many individuals caught within the complex judicial framework of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland. At this time, the city’s legal apparatus was increasingly preoccupied with the investigation of maleficium, reflecting a period of intense societal and religious scrutiny.
The archival trail for Katherine unfortunately ends with this administrative reference, as the primary source material detailing the specific charges, testimonies, or final verdict of her case could not be retrieved from the National Archives of Scotland. Consequently, while her name persists as a record of a legal proceeding, the circumstances of her arrest and the nature of the evidence brought against her remain obscured by the loss of the accompanying court papers. Katherine exists in the historical record as a silent figure, representing the thousands of Scots whose encounters with the witch-trial process were documented, yet whose personal narratives have been largely consumed by the gaps in the institutional archives.