Despite the prodigious production of scholarship relating to witchcraft in early modern Scotland over the last decade, this volume succeeds in charting gaps in existing research and challenging long-held assumptions. The editors' contributions draw heavily on their ‘Survey of Scottish Witchcraft’ (www.shc.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches/) and contest several traditional assumptions. Martin dispels the myth that Scottish witch-hunts (with the exception of that of 1662) were national by demonstrating that the majority of them were restricted to a few specific areas in any given year. Moreover, 75 per cent of surviving cases involved only one or two defendants; while a mere 4 per cent consisted of groupings over eleven which might be indicative of a panic. Similarly, Henderson demonstrates significantly more witch-hunting in the Gáidhealtachd than has been traditionally understood. Of Scotland's total surviving cases 6 per cent occurred in Gaelic-speaking regions – a significant fact considering the scant surviving records from those parts of the country. Although these statistical contributions represent a great step forward, the volume is not limited to numerical analysis. Cheape, Goodare, Davies, Miller and Cowan give detailed attention to the influence of traditional folklore on the development of concepts of witchcraft. Cheape eruditely discusses the provenance of the National Museum of Scotland's rich collections relating to witchcraft and their tendency to entrench myth rather than to educate. Cowan asserts that attacks on witchcraft represented intentional assaults on traditional culture, while Davies notes the lack of difference assigned to charmers, folk healers and witches in Scottish legislation. From the inception of witchcraft laws in 1563 all acts of magic, whether beneficial or maleficia, were deemed capital offences under ‘one of the harshest legal codes in Europe’. Miller assesses the projection of attributes derived from traditional folk entities such as fairies, elves, brownies and ghosts onto popular images of the devil and argues that they became progressively uniform as a result of the expectations of prosecutors, just as they did on the continent. So too did the manifestations of demonic possession assessed by Levack, who argues that they came late to Scotland (although no attention is given to Catholic reports from earlier in the seventeenth century) and depended heavily on previously published foreign accounts. Although witch-hunting and reports of possession did not serve as religious weapons for Scottish Protestants as they had for Scottish Catholics and English Puritans, from the inception of witchcraft legislation in 1563 until its repeal in 1736 the reality of the devil's opposition to godly society served to affirm the importance of Scotland in God's providential plans. Wasser hypothesises that the difficulty in tracing the intellectual process which brought an end to witch-hunting may be due to a long-term crisis taking place largely out with the public sphere which pitted traditional Christianised Aristotelian cosmology against new philosophies. The precarious nature and inherent risk of this dialectic becoming public was exemplified in Thomas Aitkenhead's execution in 1697 for blasphemy tending towards atheism. Thus the work of George Sinclair (studied by Wasser) and the accounts of demoniacs (cited by Levack), which aggressively set out to prove the existence of the devil and witches in order to battle the threat of atheism resulting from a growing acceptance of Cartesian philosophy, fit into this wider crisis. This volume's wide scope profoundly advances understanding of popular belief in Scotland and provides clearer statistical analysis than has hitherto been available. The result is a collection that will no doubt serve to open up new lines of inquiry profitable to scholars of Scotland and, in light of the similarities between Scotland and Europe highlighted in Goodare's chapter, for continental historians as well.