WITCHES

A deep immersion into a horrific era.

Veerapen, author of The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I (2023), incants an exhaustively thorough history of witchcraft and its often-gruesome persecution, exploring the eruption of trials from James’ day to the culmination of witch-hunting in the early 1700s, along with the zealots and charlatans who fed on it. But he cautions that the compost of human frailties that summoned the religious, personal, or politically motivated accusations and hysteria is with us still. “Sadly, the term ‘witch hunt’ has had many afterlives,” he writes. “The human propensity to label certain beliefs anathema is as strong as ever.” Today, witches usually are seen through the lens of the literary and visual arts as fanciful, even benign practitioners of magic, while “witchcraft” in its many manifestations is even accepted as a form of spiritual practice, a concept that would have flabbergasted King James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England), successor to Elizabeth I. Veerapen charts the evolution of widespread belief in demonic witchcraft in Britain and the European continent and the origins of mass panics. He also reminds us why women and the lower and middle classes fed the gallows or the flames disproportionately, and how confessions and the naming of names frequently were extracted through torture, sanctioned by church and state. Veerapen then turns his gaze to North America and the infamous Salem witch trials. The author has undoubted command of his subject and adroitly melds the scholarly and popular. But his writing style also can be choppy, fluctuating from fluid and cogent to meandering and labored, with numerous digressions, parenthetical matter, and a seemingly endless cast of characters (chief among them, James) and case studies.

Expertly realized, but the abundance of detail is enough to make a warlock cry “uncle.”