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Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History. By Wolfgang Behringer. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. xxi + 337 pp. $62.95 cloth; $28.95 paper.
This is a compellingly important, profoundly learned, and intensely frustrating book. Wolfgang Behringer is a leading historian of witch-hunting, whose work has focused especially on Germany but has been influential in witchcraft studies throughout Europe. In this book he sets out to provide nothing less than a universal history of witch-hunting. He begins in classical times, moves through early modern Europe, and ends up in the townships of contemporary South Africa. The thousands of people being killed as witches in several parts of the world today, and the scant attention paid to their fate, are in some ways at the moral heart of this book. Witch-hunting, for Behringer, is not just history.
The book's basic framework is simple enough. There is a chapter on witchcraft belief, three chapters on witch-hunting in early modern Europe (with a prelude in antiquity), and one chapter on witch-hunting from the nineteenth century onwards (largely outside Europe). A final chapter, "Old and 'New Witches,'" yokes together witchcraft historiography since the late nineteenth century and the rise of modern neopagan witchcraft.
Within this simple framework, however, readers will soon discover to their frustration that there is...