Marion Gibson's latest book is a fascinating exploration of the witchcraft outbreak in St. Osyth, Essex, in 1581. Gibson combines thorough and exacting archival research with a readable navigation of a very complex case that was hastily assembled as A True and Just Recorde of the Information, Examination, and Confession of All the Witches, Taken at S. Oses in the Countie of Essex (1582). The details will please historians and the prose will appeal to any scholar looking to assign engaging and suggestive work to students.

Gibson does an excellent job elucidating the events that led to the crisis and resulting pamphlet, partly because she does not limit her analysis to the text itself. Her exhaustive review of parish registers, manorial records, and wills, coupled with attention to social networks, credit and reputation, and the physical landscape all enable her to show the complex social, emotional, and economic realities that underlay the suspicions that led to prosecution. She provides a solid social history narration for non-experts that addresses some of the practical questions students may have. Gibson also elegantly handles some vexed questions of witchcraft studies in a way that will appeal to specialists but without alienating general readers. Both audiences will find useful synthesis and analysis in her treatment of Brian Darcy, the magistrate who assiduously investigated fifteen suspects and facilitated the executions of Ursley Kempe and Elisabeth Bennett. As others have noted, Darcy and the scribe who authored the text's aggressive preface, W.W., leaned on the work of French demonologist Jean Bodin, and Gibson argues that the two likely intended their narrative to push English witchcraft prosecutors toward a more punitive approach. This ambition fortunately came to naught after Reginald Scot skewered the authors’ logic and tactics in his skeptical text, Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), but Gibson reminds readers that was not a foregone conclusion.

Gibson elucidates the character of both Darcy and W.W. in ways likely to capture reader interest. Darcy used some of Bodin's shadier tactics, such as soliciting the suspects’ young children to inform on them and then manipulating the records to make it appear that children's testimony merely supplemented known evidence as opposed to serving as the catalyst for trapping the parents. Scholars like Barbara Rosen, Jonathan Durrant, and others have strived to identify W.W., and Gibson makes a convincing case in favor of William Whetcrofte, Jr., a lawyer and clerk who worked directly with Brian Darcy as his father had before him. There are several reasons why Whetcrofte seems a likely choice for W.W., and while that might seem to general readers like a narrow preoccupation, she presents what could have sounded like an arcane archival ambiguity into a kind of puzzle that allows readers to see how scholars not only must find but also interpret clues from the archive. This means that the narrative is as engaging as the many books that claim to solve “history's mysteries” but models how broader knowledge, context, and contingency all work together to constitute a viable interpretation; the book thus has a good deal to recommend itself to instructors.

Gibson manages the case study well, neither attempting to make it an archetype nor requiring it to be wholly unique. The St. Osyth case reflected many factors that were common across English witchcraft, including some—such as the Thomas-Macfarlane alms-denial model or the susceptibility of cunning people and midwives to suspicion—that fell out of favor with academics because they either represented something narrower than originally claimed or were the basis for exaggerated interpretations in popular accounts. Gibson demonstrates the importance of not losing the baby with the bath water, since her close reading of the suspicions, interrogations, confessions, and convictions reveals myriad ways in which pervasive belief in magic, countermagic, and the meanings of community dynamics within the domestic sphere mattered immensely in St. Osyth. Gibson does well to highlight the importance of credit and reputation, showing the problems facing women with children born outside of wedlock and who trafficked in medical/preternatural remedies. Her careful exploration of these gendered social dynamics shows her commitment to devoting sustained attention not just to magistrates and demonologists but also to the diverse unlettered accusers and accused. Gibson is among the witchcraft scholars now exploring the implications of emotions history, and she adeptly grounds her study of the narrative's explicit and implicit emotional valances in evidence from other sources that help to flesh out community life. It was not only fear, but also guilt, resentment, jealousy, and even an ineffable sense of being constrained from asking for something that could make a difference once suspicions met a receptive audience. She acquaints readers with the ways that witchcraft history is messy and evasive but does not shy away from the implications of either “feeling history” or doing “feelings history” (278–84).

I appreciated Gibson's explicit methodological choices, especially her handling of the “haunted landscape,” a nuanced treatment of space, place, and power that resonates with Marisa Fuentes's groundbreaking work on eighteenth-century Barbados (Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive [2016]). Gibson's determination to deliver readers to the fields and courtrooms where it happened, to evoke the communities involved, and carefully chart their social networks and emotional engagements, pays off. These explorations necessarily involve the frequent use of “perhaps,” but also demonstrate why declining to engage with the ephemeral aspects of these crises will fail to capture much of what made them so powerful. Gibson is also more explicit than many witchcraft scholars about the case's resonance with the twenty-first century pressures that students will hear in the narrative, and about lingering biases against certain types of sources and evidence that continue to shape the field. This all struck me as productive and suggestive of ways that scholars can reexamine witchcraft cases—a subject too easily dismissed as “already done”—both by engaging again with earlier scholarship and by applying new angles of approach that continue to shed light on these complex human crises.