Kateryna Dysa, a Professor of History at Mohyla University in Kyiv, has produced a richly detailed, carefully researched, and well written study of witchcraft and witchcraft trials in early modern Ukraine, one that is a pleasure to read. It constitutes a very lucid examination of archival records from three distinct regions of Ukraine that the author walks us through systematically. It is admirably well versed in the overall scholarship on witchcraft in Europe and elsewhere, which the author engages intensively and productively throughout the text. The narrative never wanders very far from the sources (an approach I very much appreciate), and steers clear of broad generalizations and abstractions not firmly rooted in the records themselves.

Dysa situates Ukrainian witchcraft squarely within the broader European context, not as a product of influences from the west (a point she stresses several times), but rather as a site of practices widely experienced throughout the continent. The book is built around four central chapters: the trials themselves (Ch.1); Ukrainian Orthodox demonology (Ch. 2); the anatomy of witchcraft accusations (Ch. 3); and a specific case study on infanticide (Ch. 4) The largest and in many ways the most intensive chapter (2), entitled “Beyond the Trials,” takes up nearly half the book, dealing, as the author says, in “basic anthropological structures such as neighborhood, family, power and the economy…that formed the heart of these accusations” (95).

Although conceptually organized around trial records, the book situates them within the social context as closely as possible: village life, disputes between and within families, the power of gossip, rumor, economic relations, and social status. She also adeptly integrates witchcraft accusations within the contexts of magic and folk medicine. This is very helpful since it is all part of everyday life and no clearly articulated boundary existed between, for example, healing and witchcraft, except in the context of accusations.

The picture of adjudication she paints is largely one of reasoned and judicious reflection, based to a considerable degree on testimony and case-specific evidence. The Ukrainian lands seem not to have experienced anything like a seventeenth-century witch craze, and only periodic mass accusations and trials. One is struck by the privileging of precedence, judgment, and formal law in the adjudication of accusations. Local officials took procedure seriously, and regularly exercised their authority judiciously, even leniently, often ruling in favor of the accused and only very rarely invoking the most severe punishment of death by fire. True, beheading was deemed a humane alternative, but the fact that the manner of execution was an issue to consider demonstrates the seriousness with which they took both the evidence and the law as they interpreted it.

In spots I would have liked to learn a bit more of the author's thinking on some key points of comparison. In no particular order: 1) Where does she situate the Ukrainian experience within the larger world of Orthodoxy, especially Slavia Orthodoxa and more specifically Muscovy? Was Ukrainian demonology distinctive within the broader East Slavic or Orthodox milieux? The author is quite well versed in current scholarship on Russia/Muscovy (Kivelson, Lavrov, Smilianskaia, Worobec), and a bit more comparison would, I think, be of interest. 2) On gender: the author is attentive to male/female in narrating the specific episodes, from which it seems that most of the accused were women. How does this compare with other places? Some scholarship has argued that sex ratios could vary considerably, with Scandinavia, for example, having a larger proportion of those accused being men than southern Europe. 3) Witchcraft and Ukrainian geopolitics: the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were particularly tumultuous times in that region. Is there any intersection, for example, with the Khmel΄nyts΄kyi rebellion or with the years of violence (the ruina)? Similarly, did witchcraft accusations intersect with the heightened religious tensions, vis-à-vis Uniate, Catholic, and especially Jewish populations?

A final observation, less about the book per se and more about reading it against the backdrop of our own times, when barely a day goes by without a new dark fantasy: vaccines that can turn humans into chimps, conspiratorial “others” who start forest fires by shooting lasers from space, and so on. By comparison, as Dysa convincingly demonstrates, the adjudication of witchcraft in early modern Ukraine comes across as relatively evidence based and rational, even benign! O tempora!