DOUBTFUL ORIGINS

Simon Webb. The Origins of Wizards, Witches and Fairies. Pen and Sword Books, 2023

This book contains a mass of information and conjecture; all of it diverting, some of it convincing, much of it discredited. The author takes time (55 pages to be precise) to set the context, and to introduce his wide-ranging selection of traditions, concepts and images common across Northern Europe. 

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DARKNESS AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Lizanne Henderson. Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment, Scotland, 1670-1740. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan. (Paperback) 2020.

George Orwell once wrote that history, as he was taught it as a small boy, seemed to consist of rigidly separated eras. 'For instance, in 1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main.' 

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THE GREAT ESCAPE

Serinity Young. Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females. Oxford University Press, 2018.

This is in many ways a joy of a book – certainly an unusual joy for an academic feminist book. Without ever resorting to the tedious or impenetrable jargon (oh mercy!) so beloved of far too many grant-seeking scholars, it delivers a hard-hitting historical analysis in plain, but glowing, English. 
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SUFFER NOT A WITCH

Willow Winsham. England’s Witchcraft Trials. Pen and Sword, 2018.

Willow Winsham’s earlier book, Accused: British Witches Throughout History, rather than attempting a general overview of witchcraft accusations, which might sacrifice detail and context, made a detailed examination of eleven cases, chosen to reveal the development of public attitudes to witchcraft over the centuries.
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GREEN SCREEN

Heather Greene, Bell, Book and Camera; A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television. McFarland, 2018.

Whilst writing this review I was reminded of a dream I once had. It began with my mother’s face oddly changed by her new glasses, shaped as butterfly wings. She asked me if I liked them. Her blue and grey speckled frames appeared maleficent and witchlike. I couldn’t speak. Mother’s smiles grew bigger as I backed away.

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EASTWARD HO!

Michael Howard. East Anglian Witches and Wizards. Three Hands Press, 2017.

East Anglia is a windswept, marshy land. Bordering on the North Sea, this flat, unprepossessing region, although on the edge of the populous and burgeoning London-Birmingham conurbation, has been the site of dramatic events that have helped shape the modern nation of Great Britain. 
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THE WITCH REPORT

Gordon Napier. Maleficium: Witchcraft and Witch Hunting in the West. Amberley, 2017.

"There is a modern saying that the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist. One might well wonder whether an equally great trick of his was to convince the authorities that a witch cult existed, causing churchmen and jurists to torture and kill fellow Christians whom they falsely suspected of satanic witchcraft." So says author Gordon Napier in his Preface, setting the tone nicely.

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GIVING WITCHES A BAD NAME

Summer Strevens. The Yorkshire Witch: The Life and Trial of Mary Bateman. Pen and Sword History. 2017.

This is not a book for Wiccans, occultists or historians of the esoteric. Indeed, the ‘witch’ of the title should always be in quotes as it refers to one of the most barefaced charlatans of all time – actually considerably more than just a brazen hustler.
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PACKED WITH THE DEVIL

Susan Fair. American Witches: A Broomstick Tour Through Four Centuries, Skyhorse Publishing. 2016. 

First, I must declare something of a particular, personal interest in the whole Satan-y subject. A few years ago I was denounced on live (American) radio as an agent of the Devil – literally, apparently. To my Fundamentalist accuser, there was no doubt about it. I was one of his Satanic Majesty’s most brazen PRs. What had I done to deserve this?
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WITCHES ARE PEOPLE TOO

Willow Winsham. Accused: British Witches Throughout History. Pen and Sword, 2016.

This book presents an interesting approach to the history of witchcraft in Britain. The author avoids attempting to outline the whole subject from the earliest days, which risks superficiality in a work aimed at the general public, but also resists taking a detailed look at one particular aspect of the topic, which risks losing the general reader in endless detail.
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HEART OF DARKNESS

Jean La Fontaine. Witches and Demons: A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism. Berghahn, 2016. 

This book is not, as its title might suggest, a comparison between the modern 'Witchcraft' and 'Satanism' religions, rather it is a series of essays/articles which explore the roots of belief in magical evil and how these impact in different ways on contemporary British culture.
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WITCH AND STATE

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. The British Witch: A Biography. Amberley, 2014.

In recent years much of the history of witchcraft has concerned itself with what is often called micro-history, studies of specific outbreaks and individual cases, often used to illuminate specific periods, places or themes, such as the dynamics of inter family or inter community relations.
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TROUBLE UP AT T'HILL

Jennie Lee Cobban. The Lure of the Lancashire Witches. Palatine Books, 2011.

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Joyce Froome Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches and Their Magic. Palatine Books, 2010.

Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the trial of the Pendle Witches, one of England’s most famous witch trials. Details can be found HERE. It was part of the run up to this event that these two books were produced by Palatine Books, an imprint of Carnegie Books dealing with Lancashire history.
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THE WITCHES OF WITTENBURG

Lyndal Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination. University of Virginia Press, 2012.

While it is true that publishers - even those of distinguished university presses - love to exert often flagrant spin on book titles, this one is so egregiously unfaithful to the text as to merit an acrimonious divorce. To be fair, however, a totally truthful 'The Witch in the Imagination of the People of a Small Bit of Southern Germany Between the Late 16th and Early 19th Centuries' might be deemed rather niche even to academics.
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BLACK ARTS, GREY AREA

John William Wickwar. Witchcraft and the Black Art. Fonthill Media. New edition 2012. (Originally published 1925)

Witchcraft, or not so much witchcraft as the belief in it, is a very mysterious thing. Why is it that, throughout the ages, in many different cultures that could have had no contact with each other, there was, and is, a belief that certain people, usually women, have great paranormal powers, and that they use those powers for evil?
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A COUPLE FOR HALLOWEEN

Gillian Bennett. The 100 Best British Ghost Stories. Amberley, 2012.

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Eileen Rennison. Yorkshire Witches. Amberley, 2012.

Gillian Bennett will be known to many Magonia readers as the former editor of the urban legend magazine Letters to Mr Thom as well as the author of a number of books on ghosts and aspects of contemporary legends. In this book she take a hundred stories, largely from published sources, which give a broad impression of the types of narrative which form traditional ghost stories.
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PENDLE WITCHES

Philip C Almond. The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill. I. B. Tauris, 2012.

The story of the Pendle witches, with its sinister central characters Elizabeth ‘Demdike’ Sowtherns and Anne ‘Chattox’ Whittle has become probably the best known case of English witchcraft.
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GOSPEL OF THE WITCHES

Charles Godfrey Leland. Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches, The Witches’ Almanac, Hampton Roads, 2010. (First published 1899).

Charles Leland (1824-1903), a Philadelphian who founded the Gipsy Lore Society, was particularly interested in witchcraft, using the word in its broadest sense, that is, to include fortune-tellers and the like. 

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