During the last three decades of the twentieth century, early modern European witchcraft beliefs and trials became a major focus of interest for professional historians from Russia to Australia; and remain so even though the pace of research has slowed a little in the new century. It is now approaching ten years since the last syntheses of current thinking on the subject appeared, by Wolfgang Behringer (2004) and Brian Levack (2006), and so the time is becoming ripe for another survey volume. Brian Levack has duly provided it, in the different format of a large collection of essays by experts in particular themes and on particular nations, who cover those areas of the topic respectively. They are well chosen, providing a pleasing mixture of acclaimed veterans and rising stars, though the constraints of publishing in English, and the personal networks of the American editor, have inevitably skewed their provenance: of a total of twenty-nine, eleven are based in North America, seven in Britain, three in Australia, and one in Israel, while six represent the countries of continental Europe between them. Nobody already familiar with the subject will find much in the volume which is totally novel, though it abounds with fresh details and perspectives. It seems therefore to be designed to provide a very useful overview for colleagues, students and the general public, but the price means that it will largely be confined to libraries, and to the first two groups. It has a brief introduction and no conclusion, so that readers are left to draw one for themselves, from the sum of its respective parts. What, then, is the overview that it apparently provides, and the conclusion that the present reader can draw from it?

The first most striking feature of the collection is the degree of agreement across it. There are no clashes of opinion between contributors, no serious current arguments suggested by any within the subject area, and the ‘directions for future research’ which were clearly part of the remit of contributions recommend incremental extensions of current approaches rather than radical departures. Everybody now seems to agree that ancient and medieval Europeans prosecuted people for alleged harmful magic, but that trials in the Christian period remained relatively few and episodic, and of individuals. What changed everything was a new concept of witchcraft as a satanic religion, recently devised for the destruction of humanity, which was propagated at the Council of Basel in the 1430s and enacted in persecutions in the western Alpine region in the first half of the fifteenth century. None the less, this idea was a slow-burning fuse, probably claiming only a few thousand victims before it suddenly covered much of Western and Central Europe in the period of the Reformation crisis between 1560 and 1630. Most of the 40,000 to 60,000 victims of early modern witch trials died in those years, half of them within the bounds of modern Germany. After then, witch prosecutions waned in their heartland, but burgeoned in the eastern and northern extremities of Europe and its American colonies, before dying out in the eighteenth century. Everywhere, the new model of a demonic religion meant that states were now more willing to encourage trials, but the impetus to prosecute came from ordinary people genuinely frightened of harmful magic worked against them by neighbours. As a result, execution rates were highest where systems of justice were localised and unchecked by higher authorities. Women predominated among the victims across most of Europe, but men in a minority of well-scattered areas. Prosecution was still usually a risky, expensive and divisive form of response to assumed bewitchment, so that even in areas of intense witch-hunting most communities never produced a formal accusation. The decline in trials was not, as had been believed for much of the modern period, the consequence of a growth in rational and scientific thinking, but of tighter controls over legal procedures and admissible evidence, which made convictions harder to achieve.

In confirming this consensual model, the collection actually functions as an exemplar of the Anglo-American school of early modern witchcraft studies; which is where the national identity of the contributors becomes significant. This school has always excelled, as it does here, in the intellectual, criminological, psychological, administrative, social and political aspects of the witch trials. What is almost missing from the volume is an interest in the content of stories told by and about accused witches, and the roots of these in popular culture and cosmology: precisely the aspects of the field in which some continental European scholars have been most active. As a result, important aspects of the regional patterning of trials, such as the ratio of women to men accused, are noted but never quite explained and, despite the title, this is really a book about witch-prosecuting, rather than about witchcraft. It is, however, a very good one.