Malcolm Gaskill

A great deal of scholarship as a result not the most thrilling read. However it does a good job of describing some of the misery of life for the extremely poor in rural England around the time of the English civil war. The epilogue notes that there are still witch hunts in parts of India and various African and ends as follows:

All of which prompts the question: How different are we from our 17th century ancestors? A question that becomes more taxing if 17th century ancestors is replaced with "fellow human beings in Africe and India". The truth that many find unpalatable is that in ideas, instincts and emotions we are not very different at all. Without peace and prosperity, liberty and welfare and the political and economic atability that those things depend on the thinking of the next generation in the West might swerve off in an altogether more mystical and malevolent direction. The bloodletting in the developing World is too startlingly similar to that which occurred in England during the civil war for this not to be so. Then, as now, witch-hunts involved not just savage persecutors tormenting innocent scapegoats, but ordinary neighbours with a close affinity to one another who also happened to believe in witchcraft powerfully enough to act out their most violent fantasies. This was as true of people who believed themselves to
witches as it was of those who pointed the finger. As a consequence the seventeenth-century tragedy of the witchfinders is only partialy that of Matthew Hopkins, the flawed protagonist, and of the harrowing deaths of his victims. It is at least as much a tale about feeling anxious and vulnerable in an indifferent world - a sensation of
humanity?
I am rather more hopeful than the author was here since the author notes than within a generation Hopkins was being mocked and while fear of witches continued trials and executions disappeared almost entirely.… (més)

An account of a community's stresses and strains in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, specifically the town of Springfield in the Connecticut valley. A particular man, Hugh Parsons, was a difficult person to get on with and gradually his neighbours came to believe he was a witch and had cursed them in various ways. He had a troubled relationship with his wife Mary who probably suffered mental health issues. Eventually both were accused and arrested. The book doesn't focus totally on this however as it also deals with the religious beliefs of the town's founder and his clash with the authorities in Boston because his beliefs - which sound harmless from a modern day perspective - were perceived as heresy.

Unfortunately for what was potentially an interesting subject, came across to me as rather dry and I found it not a very engaging read. For that reason, I rate it as an OK 2 stars.… (més)

'Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction' isn't a good title for this book. A better title would be 'A history of Witchcraft in Europe and the United States: A Very Short Introduction'. After reading the wonderful 'The wizard of the Crow' by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o I hoped to learn more about the role and history of witchcraft in African societies as well as witchcraft in the rest of the world. I didn't get that with this book.

What I didn't get either was an author who tried to be as subjective as possible. Malcolm Gaskill clearly doesn't believe in witches and disagrees with a number of historical theories. People who believe in witches are put away as reflecting their negative emotions, As a fellow non-believer in witches I find this really disrespectful.… (més)