This book has apparently had good press when published in 1996, so I had hopes of it being more informative than some other histories I've read of the 16th - 17th centuries, which is the main period on which this book concentrates, and of the social and religious tensions which led to the intensification of witchcraft persecution. However, it proved to be a disappointment unfortunately.

Partly, this was due to the style. The prose is quite dry, tends to long and convoluted sentences and avoids using names in favour of pronouns to such an extent that the meaning is obscured. I had to re-read some sentences three or four times to work out who he meant. One example was on page 246: "Lucie Rozieres had made no secret of her anger when her half-sister's husband Claude Borrellier sold her half of a house they shared". I think it was supposed to be the wife's half of the property, i.e. Lucie's sister who part-owned the house, but the fact that it was the sister who subsequently became ill and died rather than the brother-in-law didn't help to clarify it. There are lots of ambiguous phrases like that throughout.

The problems of clarity were not helped because the main historical source relied upon is trial records from what is now Lorraine, which abound with people who have the same names and sometimes different permutations of the same two or three names, just in a different order. As they are name checked in quick succession, in paragraphs that zoom through a number of different trials, it was difficult to keep track of who was being discussed. Possibly these people also came up later when different aspects of the persecution were being discussed, but if so, the style of presentation obscured that completely. It lent the book a fractured, bitty style.

Although the author did discuss one or two cases in more detail, such as the Salem persecutions, where the historical record is much fuller, his account was superficial and contained statements which I've seen contradicted in books that concentrate on Salem: for example, the authorities did not show rational and measured control of the proceedings, as he suggests - the trials were only halted when the escalating accusations became directed at privileged members of the community such as the governor's wife. Similarly, the jails were not speedily emptied, because not only did some people die in prison, but others languished there for a long time, unable to pay the bill (people had to pay for being imprisoned in those days and were billed for accommodation, food, and even the fetters with which they were confined). This led to whole families being impoverished, especially since their homes and goods had been illegally seized before they were convicted, even to the extent of leaving children unprovided. Most significantly, the author gives the impression that those who confessed were ensured pardon, whereas other books make it clear that they were being kept alive as witnesses against other accused - it seems likely that they, also, would eventually have been executed when those who maintained their innocence had been executed. And the profile of the witch developed in this book certainly does not fit saintly and upstanding members of the community such as Rebecca Nurse, who had no previous witchcraft reputation, but the author skates over that.

The book also rides a few hobby horses. One was a repudiation of modern New Age beliefs and the now discredited theories of Margaret Murray. Another was the idea that the persecutions had been responsible for a huge number of deaths throughout history and that this was a genocide aimed at women. Instead, the book locates it mainly in the two centuries mentioned above with an estimated total of 40,000 executions, and emphasises that about 20 to 25 per cent of accused were men (though that does still mean the vast majority were women, of course).

Some of what the author says about village tensions and the gradual accumulation of a reputation - and hence the advanced age of a lot of suspects at the time that they finally came to trial - is of interest. He does mention the guilt people would have felt at refusing charity to those who came begging, or asking for a 'loan' of food or other articles, an aspect I had already encountered in Keith Thomas' "Religion and the Decline of Magic", and goes beyond that to suggest projection, where people imagined that those to whom they refused such charity would have felt burning resentment, since they themselves would have experienced that if the positions were reversed. Those were interesting ideas, but he also veered off into fantasy when, in more than one place, he stated as a fact that children would have hated their younger siblings and the mothers who had 'abandoned' them to take care of babies, and that this was transformed into a hatred of women and a tendency to direct persecution to women in particular.

Altogether, given this balance of positive/negative aspects, I would rate this at 3 stars. ( )

A gift of science I had not thought of before I read this book --Illness as a natural phenomenon, not the result of some neighbor's curse! ( )

a thorough and intriguing look at the witch hunt. briggs does a fine job of showing how the seventeenth century craze was sustained by villagers against their neighbors, as opposed to the earlier anti-witch sentiments that came from the institutions. ( )

I've heard this described by historians (of which I am not one) as *the* book about the period of the trials. I'm not sure I'd go that far (I'd prefer a lot more footnotes, for one thing!), but it is one of the first things to read on the subject. Start here.

Amazon.com

English Historical Review. June 2003. Vol. 118, issue 477, 790-791.

New Statesman & Society. April 26, 1996. Vol. 9, issue 400, 37-38. (Reviews first edition).