Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials

<b>National Bestseller</b><br> <b>A <i>New Yorker </i>Best Book of 2024</b><br> <br><b>A “thought-provoking and timely” (<i>The Times</i>, 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.</b><br><br>This “inventive and compelling” (<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i>, London) work of social history travels through thirteen witch trials across history, some famous—like the Salem witch trials—and some lesser-known: on Vardø 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, <i>Witchcraft</i> takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, political conspiracy and individual resistance.<br> <br> Offering a striking, dramatic journey unspooling over centuries and across continents, <i>Witchcraft</i> is a “well-rounded insight into some of the strangest and cruelest moments in history” (Buzz Magazine), giving voice to those who have been silenced by history.