If the witchfinders came to your town, who would you have believed – and what would you have done?

With the English civil wars raging in the background, Witchland reveals how economic uncertainty, religious extremism and deprivation created the ideal conditions for mass witch-hunting in Britain. Across the country, fear spread rapidly, and neighbours turned on one another in panic. Women and the poor were especially vulnerable, scapegoated by the powerful looking for someone to blame, and hundreds of witch trials across the country soon followed. The hysteria provided a handbook for similar trials to occur around the world, most famously just a few decades later in Salem. 

Moving from village to village, Professor Marion Gibson reveals how accusations grew out of everyday tensions – poverty, grief, and resentment – and how entire communities became involved in the persecution of the innocent. Drawing on newly uncovered historical records, this gripping historical account restores the voices of those accused of witchcraft. These were ordinary people, largely forgotten by history, along with their families and neighbours caught up in suspicion and moral panic.

Both a powerful history and a warning from the past, Witchland is the captivating story of witchcraft, inequality and the violence that surfaces during times of political and economic upheaval.

Marion Gibson is Emerita Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter. She’s been thinking about witches in history since she read her first account of a witch trial in a book lent to her on a dark, rainy afternoon thirty years ago. She was so excited by the story that she forgot to give the book back.  She is the author of nine books on witches in history and literature, most recently Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials (Simon & Schuster) and The Witches of St Osyth (Cambridge University Press). She lives in Devon.