Witchcraft A history in thirteen trials

Historian Gibson (Reading Witchcraft) offers an empathetic survey of witch trials spanning seven centuries and three continents. Providing rich portraits of the accused, whom she argues posed a threat to the dominant social order as marginalized outsiders (being mainly female, poor, and disabled), Gibson begins with such lesser-known trials as that of Helena Scheuberin, a 15th-century Austrian woman who raged against the corruption of the Catholic church. Identifying the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts as a watershed moment in which the public first began to perceive accusations of witchcraft as baseless, Gibson explains that nonetheless belief in witchcraft persisted furtively in the West well into the 20th century and is still pervasive in Africa today. Throughout, Gibson links colonialism and state oppression to witchcraft persecution, with some examples more convincing than others; the 17th-century persecution of accused indigenous Sami witches in northern Norway and the twisted case of Montague Summers, a persecuted gay man in Edwardian England who became a priest and spent his career railing against witches, come off as better examples of state violence than the crackdown on fraudster mediums in early 20th-century Britain or the failed lawsuit against Donald Trump by Stormy Daniels, a self-professed medium. Still, this vividly drawn and often surprising account succeeds in its aim to provide an expansive vision of the witch trial that extends far beyond Salem. (Jan.)

A collection of little-known historical examples of witchcraft. A professor of "Renaissance and Magical Literatures" at the University of Exeter and author of multiple academic books about witchcraft, Gibson concentrates on motivations for bringing "witches" to trial across centuries, often for deeply misogynistic reasons. The author explains how the advent of the study of "demonology" in medieval times changed the nature of the common woman healer, ubiquitous since ancient times, into a consort of Satan. Later, the Reformation helped accelerate the vilification of such free-thinking women. Gibson begins her eye-opening tales of persecution with the 1485 trial of Helena Scheuberin in Austria, on ludicrous reasons brought forth by the newly minted demonologist Heinrich Kramer, who aimed to test his theory and later wrote the primer Malleus Maleficarum, the "hammer of witches." The book "spread demonological ideas that sparked an explosion in witch trials," such as the 1590 trial of the North Berwick witches, accused of harming King James VI and his Danish bride, Anna. Among others, Gibson chronicles the story of Samí witches in Norway, accused in 1620; Joan Wright, the first "witch" accused in America, in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1626; instances during the English Civil War; an Indigenous enslaved woman named Tatabe in Salem, Massachusetts; and the modern-day Zambian child Shula, on which the 2017 film I Am Not a Witch was based. Gibson also considers how the idea of the "witch" began to change, such as the case of Montie Summers, denigrated in the 1930s for practicing both witchery and homosexuality. The author ends with an intriguing discussion of Stormy Daniels, noting that "accusations of witchcraft were being made against her because of her sex work and her other employment as a tarot-reader, ghost-hunter, and medium, and also because she holds non-Christian religious beliefs, making her a pagan." A thought-provoking, sweeping work of social history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.