Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft

'Much nonsense has been written on this subject', wrote Keith Thomas in a famous and influential footnote to his own pioneering chapter on English witchcraft in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In similar vein, Robin Briggs remarks near the st art of this magnificent new survey that 'common assumptions about the subject tend to have one very marked feature in common, which is that they are hopelessly wrong' (p. 9). The concept of witchcraft is notoriously slippery; scholarly research over the past quarter-century has barely changed the received ideas of most people. Some of what reputable and intelligent scholars have contributed to the subject has proved at best untypical of the wider witchcraft phenomenon, at worst seriously misleading. Robin Briggs has devoted many years to meticulous examination of a large body of trial records of witchcraft cases from the Duchy of Lorraine in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this book he has brought the insights from that research to a synt hesis and survey of the social context of all early modern witchcraft cases in western Europe and New England. The resulting book will have a deeply corrosive effect on all sorts of traditional wisdom about the subject of witchcraft and society.