A tangent in r/badhistory got me thinking - most of what I've heard/learned about European witchcraft is either cases of people being accused of witchcraft by others or debunked "Burning Times" -type stuff.
Were there actual people that identified themselves explicitly as witches (or local language equivalent) outside of confessions given under duress? I realize that'd be tricky to find any kind of documentation for, but I figured if anyone would have a reliable source or the ability to point me in the right direction it'd be you guys!
Surprisingly, the answer is "yes." It was trendy in the early days of contemporary witchcraft like Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches (1899) to claim descent from "traditional" witch-cult traditions - pretty much all such claims are dubious today - but it is well-documented that there were "cunning folk" and folk magicians who lived and worked during the time period. A great resource is Owen Davies' Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History. Davies mentions early on in the book (13):
Accusations of witchcraft under such circumstances were certainly one of the hazards of the profession. During the period of the witch trials, however, very few such instances progressed to the level of prosecution. Out of the 400 people accused of withcraft in Essex only four are identifiable as cunning-folk.
The darker side of that are folks that pretended or claimed to be witches, specifically for gain. Their modus operandi could be somewhere between normal cunning folk and racketeers, although that might be uncharitable, as many were desperately poor. The most famous case of those claims falling out is the Lancashire Witch Trials in 1612, which involved two "cunning families" - which didn't help them when these pretend-witches were tried as actual witches. A good book on that is The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill.