WITCH HUNT

A historian travels far beyond Salem in search of lingering marks of witchcraft’s past.

In Witches, Sluts, Feminists (2017), Sollée, a writer and curator who teaches gender studies at the New School, offered a quick introduction to centuries of misogyny and the ways in which superficially distinct categories of womanhood overlap. In her latest book, she takes readers on a tour of physical sites with witchy pasts in Europe, the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. The author provides historical and geographic specificity that is often elided and obscured in popular depictions of witchcraft—including those by self-described witches. Some locales in the book have turned their connections with witchcraft into kitschy pastiches of shops and attractions, but even in those places, Sollée digs into the history that lies beneath the tourist trap. The author’s trip to Germany is emblematic of her journey as a whole. When she climbed the highest peak in the Harz Mountains, she was visiting a place sacred to Saxon pagans, the setting for a diabolical orgy in Goethe’s Faust, and the site of an annual gathering of contemporary witches. In Thale, Sollée went to a theme park where she saw “statues of a naked Devil and witch that children were treating like jungle gyms.” The medieval village of Quedlinburg offers a quiet contrast to the sensational entertainments of Thale, but this storybook town executed so many accused witches that it’s the source for the oft-repeated and ahistorical suggestion that millions of women died during the witch hunts of the early modern era. This is clearly written for a general audience, but Sollée’s judicious use of scholarly sources adds weight to the text and serves as a guide to readers who want to learn more.

A valuable resource for planning a magical itinerary—or exploring the landscape of witchcraft from the couch.