Description
Book SynopsisNational Bestseller A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 A ';thought-provoking and timely' (The Times, London) global history of witch trials across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, told through thirteen distinct trials that illuminate a pattern of demonization and conspiratorial thinking that has profoundly shaped human history.This ';inventive and compelling' (
The Times Literary Supplement, London) work of social history travels through thirteen witch trials across history, some famouslike the Salem witch trialsand some lesser-known: on Vard island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country's last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft was feared, then decriminalized, and then reimagined as gendered persecution,
