In this succinct book, P.G.Maxwell-Stuart sets out to synthesise some of the best recent literature on witchcraft in the early modern world and to provide a guide for students and the general reader to some of the major themes within the subject.
In this aim he succeeds very well and has produced a clear, wide-ranging and stimulating introduction to many of the complex issues and much of the immense variety with which the phenomenon and its prosecution presents us.
By beginning his account in the later middle ages, the author does his readers a great service, since this enables him to explore the lineage of many of the beliefs which were to become most exposed in the 16th and 17th centuries, and to trace the continuities in thought, as well as the discontinuities, on either side of the Reformation.
The book very helpfully delineates the various strands of belief system, including natural, deceptive and demonic magic, as well as the terminology used to describe their exponents, such as 'sorcerer', 'magician' and 'witch', and it explores the particular contexts in which they acquired their meanings. Indeed, one of the important points of this book is to demonstrate the term 'witchcraft' encompasses a multitude of different mentalities and practices, of which only the detailed study of particular circumstances can make sense.
Maxwell-Stuart successfully lays to rest some of the common misconceptions about witchcraft with which many of us grew up.
A number of recent studies make it clear witches were by no means always women, they were not necessarily the old and marginal members of peasant society and the motives for their prosecution do not fit any consistent or monolithic pattern. The number of unfortunates actually executed for such crimes was no doubt far fewer than was once believed, and it is difficult to find episodes of persecution which warrant the label 'witch-craze' or 'mania'.
The Inquisition, it is useful to be reminded, does not always merit the dark reputation which centuries of Protestant propaganda has ensured for it. Indeed, the judicial procedures under Lutheran and Calvinist regimes after the Reformation could be no less brutal.
The geographical range of the book is another of its strengths. The core of examples is drawn from England and Scotland, France and Germany, but we are also given brief summaries of the history of witchcraft in Scandinavia, Iceland, Russia, Hungary, Poland, New England and Canada. This serves to emphasise the point about the diversity of motives behind, and course of, prosecutions in different areas, and it also demonstrates their varied chronology: in Poland, for example, there were over 5,000 executions between 1676 and 1725, by which time they had already come to an end in Britain.
In summary, this is a book which will be of great value to all teachers of the subject. It is accompanied by a full bibliography which directs the reader to more detailed treatments of the material for which Maxwell-Stuart whets the appetite. This is, as he concedes, a selective list of recent publications, although one might have expected to see Brigg's Witches and Neighbours and Roper's Oedipus and the Devil included.
