This important new collection of essays offers a wide readership both an up-to-date account of the present state of scholarship on early modern European witchcraft and an indication of the direction of new research. The contributors build on and respond to the issues raised in Keith Thomas' classic study Religion and the Decline of Magic, and suggest a greater emphasis on cultural history, notably issues of power, gender and language. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English...

This volume provides a valuable introduction to the key concepts of witchcraft and demonology through a detailed study of one of the best known and most notorious episodes of Scottish history, the North Berwick witch hunt, in which King James was involved as alleged victim, interrogator, judge and demonologist. It provides hitherto unpublished and inaccessible material from the legal documentation of the trials in a way that makes the material fully comprehensible, as well as full texts of the pamphlet News from Scotland and James' Demonology, all in a readable, modernised, scholarly form....