This was a fascinating bit of historical nonfiction. In particular, I enjoyed the balance between history and historiography. This was meticulously researched, and it shows. Unfortunately, that means the writing occasionally feels a bit like a glorified list. However, ultimately I thought this was a good thing--when Hutton makes a point, he backs it up with PLENTY of evidence.

I think it's worth pointing out that this book doesn't feel very accessible. It's clearly written with an academic audience in mind, and I don't think that people who are unused to monographs would enjoy reading this all that much. That said, I greatly enjoyed this!

Straight off the bat I should state that Ronald Hutton's The Witch is very much a scholarly work. In essence it reads like a long essay, and at times the prose is pretty dry. Therefore, this is probably not a book I'd recommend to a general reader who simply wants to learn more about witches. However, Hutton's passion for his subject certainly shines through, and it is easy to see that a lot of research and thought went into the book, making it an excellent resource for scholars of both the early modern justice system and folklore/myth. I enjoyed reading the arguments for and against equating witches and witch hunts with different aspects of pagan and shamanistic beliefs and practices; however, I did feel bogged down at times in all the 'he said--she said' as Hutton quoted different sources. Overall, I would therefore rank this book at 3.5-4 stars. It is a work that makes a lot of interesting points, but one that I wish had been a little more vibrant in terms of the prose and the presentation of the material.

Between 1484 – when the Pope condemned all forms of witchcraft as heresy punishable by death – and the end of the eighteenth century, at least 100,000 alleged witches were accused, tortured and executed in Europe. Some of these women were quite young. Most were very old. Almost all were very poor. Most of their accusers were men.

What were the witches’ supposed crimes?

First and foremost, witches were said to be in league with the Devil, and in return for worship of Satan had been given various powers. With the Devil’s aid a witch could ruin the life of anyone she chose. Bringing illness, madness, accident or death. She could ruin a marriage by producing sterility in the woman or impotence in the man. She could make livestock sicken and die or ruin crops with hailstone or unseasonable rain.

The most obvious of witches’ alleged powers was that of levitation, because it was said that witches flew – often on broomsticks – to attend their meetings or covens. They would meet together in isolated spots at night in order to celebrate a black Sabbath: a travesty of the Christian mass.

The most important question is why, in what was supposedly the most advanced and civilised societies of the day, did apparently normal, sane human beings believe in malevolent witches (and all the associated infernal paraphernalia such as familiars) to such an extent that they persecuted and killed so many?

Very briefly, the answer seems to lie in the fact that most of those accused were lonely, vulnerable old women. These women needed help from their relatives and neighbours but when they asked for it or went begging for help they were refused. Instead of loving their neighbour and showing Christian charity, people hardened their hearts and sent these people on their way with nothing, or with nothing more substantial than a piece of their mind. The old crone had her pride, and in her frustration and righteous indignation might mutter some curse or threat against the person who’d refused her aid. This would be remembered when something went wrong. When the cow failed to produce milk or the hen failed to lay eggs it would be used as evidence that the old woman had cast a spell and bewitched her neighbour. Then it would be but a short step from accusation to (torture-extracted) confession and execution.

What we have here is what psychologists call projection and displacement. The person who turned the woman away from their door often felt guilty about treating their neighbour ill, so they displaced their own guilt by projecting it onto the very person that they had mistreated. Thus instead of facing up to their responsibilities and the consequences of their actions they found a scapegoat and made out that they were the victims rather than the victimizers.

Ronald Hutton’s ‘The Witch’ is a profound meditation on this phenomenon. As is clear from the book’s subtitle – ‘A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present’ – he sets the Early Modern European witch-craze, and British witch trials in particular, within the broadest possible chronological framework. More than that, he also ranges across the globe and derives insights on witchcraft from anthropology, ethnography and, to a lesser extent, psychology.

What emerges is a scholarly but highly readable global survey of the ubiquity of witchcraft beliefs which not only exhibits a complete mastery of the subject’s historiography but represents a major contribution to it. It is not as monumental a book as Keith Thomas’s ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic’ nor as impishly well-written as Hugh Trevor-Roper’s ‘European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ but Hutton’s book certainly belongs in the same company as those classic texts.