Witchcraft
A History in Thirteen Trials
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Salem, King James VI, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch hunts and witch trials sounds antiquated, relics of an unenlightened and brutal age. However, 'witch hunt' is heard often in the present-day media, and the misogyny it is rooted in is all too familiar today. A woman was prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 1944.
This book uses thirteen significant trials to explore the history of witchcraft and witch hunts. As well as investigating some of the most famous trials from the middle ages to the 18th century, it takes us in new and surprising directions. It shows us how witchcraft was decriminalised in the 18th century, only to be reimagined by the 1780s Romantic radicals. We will learn how it evolved from being seen as a threat to Christianity to perceived as gendered persecution, and how trials against chieftains in Africa stoked anger against colonial rule.
Significantly, the book tells the stories of the victims - women, such as Helena Scheuberin and Joan Wright - whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James VI and I and “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them.
While this will be a history of witchcraft, the subject cannot be consigned to the history books. Hundreds of people, mostly women, are tried and killed as witches every year in Africa. ‘WITCH HUNT!’ is as common in our language today as ever it was, and witches are still on trial across the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Gibson (Reading Witchcraft) offers an empathetic survey of witch trials spanning seven centuries and three continents. Providing rich portraits of the accused, whom she argues posed a threat to the dominant social order as marginalized outsiders (being mainly female, poor, and disabled), Gibson begins with such lesser-known trials as that of Helena Scheuberin, a 15th-century Austrian woman who raged against the corruption of the Catholic church. Identifying the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts as a watershed moment in which the public first began to perceive accusations of witchcraft as baseless, Gibson explains that nonetheless belief in witchcraft persisted furtively in the West well into the 20th century and is still pervasive in Africa today. Throughout, Gibson links colonialism and state oppression to witchcraft persecution, with some examples more convincing than others; the 17th-century persecution of accused indigenous Sami witches in northern Norway and the twisted case of Montague Summers, a persecuted gay man in Edwardian England who became a priest and spent his career railing against witches, come off as better examples of state violence than the crackdown on fraudster mediums in early 20th-century Britain or the failed lawsuit against Donald Trump by Stormy Daniels, a self-professed medium. Still, this vividly drawn and often surprising account succeeds in its aim to provide an expansive vision of the witch trial that extends far beyond Salem.
