In recent years Andrew Sneddon has emerged as the leading expert in Irish beliefs and prosecutions concerning magic and witchcraft, and he now cements that reputation with this excellent book. In the past two decades some good case studies have been made of the subject, two by Sneddon himself, but this is the first properly-researched overall survey. Ireland has long enjoyed a reputation as a kingdom almost free of the early-modern witch trials, and a discussion has developed over the reasons. In one sense this book makes the problem even greater than before. It reduces the total of trials still further, to four with a single execution resulting: of the British nations even Wales beat that, and all four Irish trials were among the Protestant British settler population. At the same time, however, it shows that both Irish Catholics (both Old Irish and Old English) and Irish Protestants believed in witches during the period: Old English aristocrats and the wife of one Gaelic nobleman accused relatives of attempting to use witchcraft in family feuds, and there were many rumours of it among the New English. Moreover, Ireland had more or less the same laws against it as England, and the same legal machinery with which to take action. To make the contrast more glaring, it is now clear that Irish Catholics, including Gaels, made regular use of law courts controlled by Protestant English officials, with respect to other offences than witchcraft.

However, Sneddon also provides some convincing answers. The lack of trials among the New English was largely due to the fact that the bulk of that population arrived in the seventeenth century, when judges in general were starting to become cautious in accepting accusations of witchcraft. With respect to the Catholic majority, he agrees with my own work, and argues that it lacked both the concept of the satanic witch and the thought that witches did not normally injure humans or livestock. He agrees also with the significance in preventing witch trials of the persistence of beliefs in the evil eye, in fairies, and in the efficacy of counter-magic. He documents these beliefs more securely in the early-modern period. The importance of the tradition, which the Irish shared with other Gaels, that the chief activity of witches was the less serious one of stealing milk or butter by magical means, is also emphasised. In all this, he and I are in complete accord. Indeed, we are even closer together than he seems to think, when he tries to find minor differences between us such as his emphasis that some Catholic nobles feared witchcraft, as said, and that the ‘evil eye’ could be regarded as intentional. In reality there remains no dispute between us, because I have never denied the first point, and also stated quite firmly that the ‘evil eye’ in Ireland, as in Scotland, was not always treated as innocent of malice. The crucial point, which we both make, is that the native Irish feared witchcraft less than most Europeans did and were less disposed to view it as a satanic conspiracy.

There is much more, however, to the book than this discussion. It relates the actual witch trials in detail and sets early-modern Irish attitudes to witches firmly in the broader context of those to the supernatural. It shows how scepticism regarding witchcraft came subsequently to be a self-defining hallmark of the Georgian Protestant ascendancy. It also makes a proper study of the place of service magicians – ‘cunning folk’ – in Irish culture from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and here his great achievement is to show a remarkable lack of contrasts. In their character, clientele, activities and trajectory of relationships with the authorities, those of Ireland seem virtually the same as those already studied in England and Wales, and this is true across all religious denominations. This is one of those monographs, which mark the end of one phase of the study of a subject, and opens another.