This is an invaluable addition to regional studies of witchcraft in early modern Europe, bringing important recent Polish-language research into contact with interpretations and styles of inquiry currently being developed for other parts of Europe. It concentrates on the mainly urban trials that characterised the Polish prosecution at its height (from 1610 to 1750), and on the cases of just over 450 accused witches. Carefully sidestepping the model of centre and periphery, it argues that Polish witch trials fit comfortably into patterns found elsewhere – especially in their expression of everyday fears and concerns, mainly malefice, in their unsupervised and decentralised character, and in never resulting in a ‘witchcraze’. Ostling establishes the now standard contexts for his subject – social, cultural and legal – and is particular good at showing how the familiar strains of acute pressure on resources and a zero-sum attitude to good fortune in a peasant economy shaped suspicions, accusations and charges. His findings on milk-theft as Polish witchcraft's central metaphor and what this suggests about ‘the circulation of moisture’ as a theme of peasant welfare link well with Lyndal Roper's work on Germany. His main accomplishment, indeed, is to place meaning at the centre of his analysis, treating witchcraft as ‘a religious-cultural phenomenon with its own symbolic logic’ (p. 15). Witchcraft was the product of common languages and idioms, enabling us – in another reflection of a more general historiography – to hear witches ‘co-creating’ their own confessions even under torture. This was partly a question of sharing in a peasant cosmology and partly a result of the effectiveness of post-Tridentine models of eucharistic piety. The centrepiece of the book, in chapters vi and vii, is a highly effective reading of the allegations that witches stole consecrated hosts for magical use or simply to desecrate them against the background of Catholic sacramental teachings and practices that were communally adopted – even by the accused themselves. One outcome of this approach is that Ostling is well-placed to offer us vital insights not just about Polish witches but about how historians are to interpret the religious circumstances from which they emerged without making assumptions that are themselves of Christian provenance – ‘insider’ assumptions, so to speak. This is the subject of the particularly subtle and important chapter viii. All the more disappointing, therefore, is the book's major ontological confusion about the reality of witchcraft. Witches are throughout described as ‘imagined’ because witchcraft did not really exist, whereas the book's very subject is the beliefs and actions of those historical agents who for 250 years believed largely that it did, and its declared aim is to allow these beliefs and actions to speak for themselves. We do not have to accept Clifford Geertz's famous suggestion that the real may be as imagined as the imaginary to see that the historian has no business adjudicating the ontological preferences of the past.