A lively and immersive global history of witchcraft which shows its evolution from the Middle Ages to the present day and shines a light on the stories of the victims, told in thirteen trials.

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.

Autorentext
Marion Gibson is Emerita Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter. 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 thirty years ago. She was so excited by the story that she forgot to give the book back. She is the author of nine books on witches in history and literature, most recently Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials (Simon & Schuster) and The Witches of St Osyth (Cambridge University Press). She lives in Devon.

Klappentext

**'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
 
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 today’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. 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.  

Helena Scheuberin * Anny Sampson * Gillie Duncan
Kari Edisdattar * Bess Clarke * Tatabe of Salem
Marie-Catherine Cadière * Nellie Duncan
Stormy Daniels
 
These are their stories*
 
'Thought-provoking and timely... Searing'
Jessie Childs, The Times**