Jonathan Durrant's book is a study of the three severe phases of witch-hunting which took place between 1590 and 1631 in the German bishopric of Eichstätt in Franconia. The death toll during these waves of persecution was high: during the final phase alone, which began in 1617, 98 per cent of the accused were found guilty of witchcraft and executed. Altogether, Durrant estimates that between 217 and 256 people were executed during the witch-hunts, most of them women. Durrant gives a convincing reason for his focus on the large-scale hunts: ‘the dominance of perspectives which focus on small episodes … and the conflicts that precipitated them tends to obscure the fact that most witchcraft narratives were not so easily packaged’ (p. xvii). He reminds us of one obvious, but nevertheless sometimes forgotten, fact: different dynamics drive large-scale witch-hunts than the many smaller incidents spread across the Holy Roman Empire. He shows that the hunts were instigated, steered and supported by powerful people, ranging from religious reformers, Counter-Reformation groups such as the Jesuits, right up to Prince-Bishop Johann Christoph von Westerstetten (who ruled from 1613 to 1637). It becomes clear from Durrant's research that, contrary to the findings of many other accounts of witchcraft, the persecution of witches in Eichstätt was a top-down phenomenon and pushed by the elites not by peasants or townspeople. What is more, most victims do not fit the usual characteristics of a witch: instead of telling us about old crones, Durrant's sources mention women who belonged to highly integrated and respected families and were by no means the stereotypical marginalised loners. Another focus of Durrant's research is the narratives that those accused of witchcraft constructed under torture, where they would suffer enormous pain and anxiety while they had to describe the sabbaths that they had attended and were forced to name their fellow witches. In their attempts to escape more torture and the executioner, people tried to make their stories as believable and seemingly real as they could by talking about places and people they knew and by interweaving their narratives with people of their own social circle, neighbours, godparents, even family members. Durrant has collected the names that he encountered in these and other sources and used them as the basis for his detailed research on the social networks of those standing accused of witchcraft. His surprising conclusion is that the trial records should be read as proof of ‘social cohesion’ (p. 127) rather than evidence of social tensions and enmity, as they often are. Durrant's meticulous and highly readable study reminds us that witchcraft trials need to be interpreted with a careful eye for detail and an interest in the complexities of real life springing from each case. Whereas the ‘witches’ were busy constructing authenticity for the witch-hunters, historians must think outside the rigid categories of good and evil to search for the revealing details in between and to meet a world full of people, just as Jonathan Durrant has done.