Author: Malcolm Gaskill
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010
Price: £7.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780199236954

Oxford University Press’s very short (and very small) introduct­ions to topics from African history to the WTO have a Tardis-like ability to cram in more material than seems possible, given their diminutive size. Malcolm Gaskill is used to a broader canvas: his previous books include Witchfinders, a fine study of the unlovely Matthew Hopkins’s role in 17th-century East Anglian witchhunts, and Hellish Nell, about the Susan Boyle lookalike Helen Duncan, who was jailed for witchcraft in 1944 after being tried under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Despite this, he has shoehorned 20 years’ research of the liminal into not much more than 100 pages, leavened with humour (“It’s not very historical to call Heinrich Kramer a superstitious psychopath, but he was up that end of the medieval spectrum”).

Gaskill describes this book as “an exploration of the idea of witchcraft in different contexts over time”, tracing it from spells pressed into clay tablets and images of witches being burned in Mesopotamia to the UK’s 2008 Fraudulent Mediums Act and the even more recent disturbing stories of body parts of albino Tanzan­ians and Kenyans being traded for muti. And in London in 2000, eight-year-old Victoria Climbié’s guardians tortured her to death after their pastor denounced her as a witch.

Witchcraft, says Gaskill, is “maddeningly ungrippable” – definitions and ideologies change: early Christians demonised pagan gods, and Catholic prayers were devilish to Protestants in the same way as dissident Cathars had been satanic to their orthodox Christian brethren. “When the witch symbol bubbles up from our unconscious,” he suggests, “it isn’t always Ghoulish Gertie cackling on a broomstick: it might be a Muslim, a Jew or a Roma. Archetypes know many stereotypes.” Witchcraft, like war, he memorably writes, was politics by other means, and its crises coincided with periods of political upheaval, demographic disasters, war and even climate change. It was a safety valve and a way for later scholars to gauge the depth of societal cracks, though the same scholars have to deal with fakery and the problem of relying on decontextualised historical records.

Each chapter in this small but perfectly-formed book could be the jumping-off point for a year’s stimulating reading. Buy it now.