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 also be weaponised and marginal people, mostly women, labelled as wicked and dangerous. Together they comprise not only a history of witchcraft but a cautionary tale’
Kari Edisdattar * Bess Clarke * Tatabe of Salem *
Marie-Catherine Cadière * Nellie Duncan
Stormy Daniels These are their stories
Malcolm Gaskill, creator of
The Ruin of All Witches Helena Scheuberin * Anny Sampson * Gillie DuncanKari Edisdattar * Bess Clarke * Tatabe of Salem *
Marie-Catherine Cadière * Nellie Duncan
Stormy Daniels These are their stories
‘Thought-provoking and timely… Searing’
The world of
witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. Alternatively, we steadily hear ‘witch-hunt’ in lately’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018.In
Witchcraft – a stunning hardback with 16 pages of beautiful illustrations – Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. In addition to exploring the origins of witch-hunts through one of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions.It shows us how witchcraft was once reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even lately a witch trial can come in many guises.
Professor Gibson also tells
the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too steadily 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 only a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are really still on trial.
