Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction

by Malcolm Gaskill

View product page

Throughout history, to the present day, witchcraft raises questions about the distinction between reality and fantasy, faith and proof. This Very Short Introduction explores witchcraft, both as a contemporary phenomenon and an historical subject. It looks at witch-beliefs and accusations around the world, from pre-history to the present.

Download this VSI Reading Guide as an Adobe PDF (23 KB)

Questions for thought and discussion

• Is there some inherent quality in human beings that either draws them to witchcraft or predisposes them to detect it in others?



• How, in broad terms, have the stereotypes, images, and cultural associations of witchcraft changed between the classical age and the present day?



• Why throughout history have witches been so strongly associated with women?



• Throughout the ages, many men have been tried and executed for witchcraft, but can a man ever be a witch in the same way as a woman?



• Why have some writers, notably the Egyptologist Margaret Murray in the 1920s, supposed that European witches belonged to some kind of fertility cult?



• Is it right that we should stand in judgement of those who once persecuted witches, or are we restricted to trying to understand our ancestors in their own times?



• What are the major historical myths about witches, especially during the ‘witch-craze’, and why are they so hard to dispel with hard fact?



• How can we explain the massive surge of witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?



• Why do you think the acquittal rate at early modern witch-trials was so high in south-east England (where the survival of detailed records is good) somewhere around 75 per cent?



• What emotion is involved in witchcraft accusations, and is it helpful to think in terms of ‘hysteria’, for example in relation to the Salem trials of 1692?



• Is it correct to talk of a decline of witchcraft beliefs in the Western world between the eighteenth century and the present day?



• How do modern Wiccans stand in relation to witchcraft’s historical past?



• Why are witch-hunts, rather than just witch-beliefs, so common today in the developing world and what might be done to inhibit them?



• What, if anything, do the broomstick-flying witches of the children’s storybook have in common with their historical antecedents?



• Why does the fascination with witches endure in popular culture, in everything from novels and films to cartoons and games?

Other Books by Malcolm Gaskill

• Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)



• Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches (London: 4th Estate, 2001)



• 'The Matthew Hopkins Trials', volume 3 in James Sharpe and Richard M. Golden (eds), Writings on English Witchcraft 1560–1736, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003)



• Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London: John Murray, 2005)



• Out of this World: English Adventures in America, 1607-1692 (forthcoming)

Further Reading

• Jeffrey B. Russell and Brooks Alexander, A New History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007)



• John Demos, The Enemy Within: a Short History of Witch-Hunting (London: Penguin, 2010)



• Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2006)



• Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: the Social and Cultural Context of Witchcraft, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)



• Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)



• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: a History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)