Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials

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Witchfinder General,Salem, Malleus Maleficarum.The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear witch-hunt in todays 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, 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. It shows us how witchcraft was 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 today 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 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.

Author Bio

Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, UK. She's been thinking about witches in history since she read her first account of a witch trial in a book lent to her on a dark, rainy afternoon in November 1991. She was so excited by the story that she forgot to give the book back. Thirty years on, she is the author of nine books on witches in history and literature. Her most recent book is The Witches of St Osyth for Cambridge University Press.