If early modern witchcraft has become an industry, Scottish historians are helping to keep it booming. Modern Scottish witchcraft studies, long dominated by the work of Christina Larner, have gained energy in the last decade. In Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, a number of historians expand on recent developments, question assumptions, and offer directions for further research. The three editors, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce Miller, were directors and researchers of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563–1736 (http://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/witches/), an online database available since 2003. In the present volume, Martin and Miller jointly explain the survey and its value for researchers. All the editors have contributed articles here, as they did in 2002 for The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, edited by Goodare.

The second volume reviewed here, Brian Levack's Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion, asks why witch hunting in Scotland was much more intense than in England. In this rigorously researched and extremely well-written work, Levack continues the thoughtful approach demonstrated in The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987; 3rd ed. 2006) and culminates his study of witch hunting in Scotland. It is not surprising that law is at the center of this legal historian's thesis, given his similar argument in earlier work. Here, however, his equal focus on politics and religion and, more important, his integration of the three (law, politics, and religion) in explaining the intensity of Scottish witch hunting demonstrate a deep understanding of the way these forces worked together to promote, and eventually end, witch hunting. The detailed exposition of these three elements in the context of relations between center and periphery and the relationship of elite and popular responsibility for witch hunting demonstrates the author's mastery of the sources with regard to these elements. And a rich knowledge of the English experience supports a meaningful comparison of the two countries.

Levack asserts that he does not focus on social and economic factors or gender because they do not help to explain the intensity of Scottish witch hunting in comparison to that of England. “Any effort to link the greater intensity of Scottish witch-hunting with attitudes towards women confronts the uncomfortable fact that women formed a greater percentage of the total number of witches in England [92 percent] than in Scotland [85 percent]” (2). It is not clear why this fact above others should be “uncomfortable,” and his assertion that gender is ruled out of consideration because of similar gender roles in the two countries is curious. It seems that in the matter of prosecutions of women, England had a slightly more intense experience, and some explanation for this reversal is in order. It is likely that the contribution of gender to accusations of both women and men is closely tied to social, economic, and cultural realities in a complex fashion that goes beyond Levack's conclusion that the accused in 1661–62 were mostly economically vulnerable women. The lack of evidence that prohibits any extension of this conclusion suggests the need for more local and prosopographical studies to reach more complex conclusions about the role of social and economic factors, including gender. These conclusions probably would not supplant the complex insights Levack has reached here, but they might show them in a different light and even explain them further.

Lauren Martin would surely laud Levack's microhistory of the 1661–62 hunt and the attention he pays to the accused there. However, in her article, she is concerned that in Scottish witchcraft studies overall (and, by implication, European witchcraft studies as well), too much attention is paid to “national panics” defined by counting suspects, which she would label “peak periods” of witchcraft accusations. The “suspect-counting model” overemphasizes the elite-inspired view of witchcraft as demonic and conspiratorial, while failing to attend to the more common experience of a parish community's accusing only a single maleficent witch. Martin would privilege a “wiollection of articles to the issue that has long vexed historians of witchcraft and witch hunting, the interplay between elite belief that witchcraft represented a demonic conspiracy against Christian society and popular belief in low black magic (maleficia). Martin implicitly critiques the weight most historians currently give to elite belief and practice. On the question of the separation of elite and popular belief, Goodare and Miller follow Peter Burke's assertion that “the elite were not detached from popular culture, but they had distinct beliefs and traditions to which the common people had no access.” They deal with varieties of elites by noting that they “moved in at least some of the same circles” (3). Joyce Miller's elites were implicitly more distinct. She examines cases in which a demonic figure appears and finds that most descriptions in confessions did not accord with elite descriptions in biblical exegesis and other demonological sources. She concludes that if we assume confessions were influenced by interrogators (often seen as elites), the questioners did not attempt to shape them to fit descriptions found in elite writing.

The devil or demons also play a role in Brian Levack's article and related book chapter on demonic possession, in which he explores reasons for the near absence of cases of possession in Scotland before 1696 and assigns responsibility to various elites. Contributing factors included the attitude of James VI; elite belief that fraud was behind cases of possession in Catholic countries and later in England; and the impact of orthodox Calvinist ministers’ belief that demoniacs, morally suspect and in danger of becoming witches themselves, could only save themselves with a humiliating public confession of their sins—a belief that led to suicides rather than proclamations of possession. Only when English Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter used possession as proof of the reality of spirits and Protestant ministers constructed an interpretation of possession that did not require the disgrace of public confession could cases become public and witches be blamed.

In his consideration of elite belief, Michael Wasser complicates the view argued by Levack that judicial skepticism about the reliability of evidence, which emerged during the hunt of 1661–62, was responsible for the decline of witch hunting. He argues that the new scientific paradigm was eating away at elite witchcraft beliefs long before judicial skepticism appeared.

The editors’ broad definition of “witchcraft” allows for consideration of diverse magical beliefs and practices. Owen Davies contributes a thoughtful consideration of the practitioners of good magic in Scotland and elsewhere, wherein he very usefully distinguishes the simple healing of charmers from the services of cunning folk, supports the precise use of terms, and argues that Scotland's prosecution of cunning folk was unusual. In articles focusing on Scotland alone, Edwin Cowan examines cases from the 1590s to catalog the “folk belief” revealed, and Hugh Cheape considers the collections in the National Museum of Scotland of material objects ostensibly related to charming and the history of collecting they indicate. Lizanne Henderson compares beliefs of Gaelic-speaking areas with other regions in Scotland to conclude that they were virtually indistinguishable.

Julian Goodare puts Scotland in the European context, concluding that Scottish witchcraft belief and witch hunting were typical, although he also finds some distinctive dimensions in the sustained support that Scottish witch hunting gave to a program of godly discipline, beliefs concerning fairies, and practices of witch pricking and sleep deprivation. Scotland's centralized system of authorizing trials (while eventually repressing witch hunting) appears to have drawn out witch hunting chronologically. These two volumes contribute immensely to Scottish history and to our understanding of early modern beliefs and practices relating to witchcraft.