The Superstitions of Witchcraft

Howard Williams traces in one continuous narrative how belief in witchcraft took hold across Europe and what it cost. He works through three stages: the magic of Chaldea, Persia, Judea, Greece and Rome; the medieval church’s decision to fold sorcery into heresy; and the mass prosecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Individual chapters take up the bull of Innocent VIII, the Malleus Maleficarum and its criminal code, Reginald Scot’s sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584, the possession scandals of seventeenth-century France, the careers of astrology and alchemy, and Scotland’s grim record of trials. Writing in 1865, Williams keeps the victims rather than the marvels in view, reviewing a creed that in his own words sent thousands to the brutal treatment chamber, the stake and the scaffold.