Witchcraft
A History in Thirteen Trials
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
'These stories of witchcraft, true and vividly told, demonstrate the potent reality of belief in evil and how in any era or place fear can be weaponised and marginal people, mostly women, labelled as wicked and dangerous. Together they comprise not just a history of witchcraft but a cautionary tale’
Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin of All Witches
'Thought-provoking and timely... Searing'
Jessie Childs, The Times
In Witchcraft, Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions.Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018.
Professor Gibson also tells the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them.
Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial.
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.
