At the heart of this tale of murder is a depressingly familiar story: the cantankerous sixty-year-old Anna Schmieg, feared for her foul curses and ill temper, wife of a miller in the beautiful countryside of southwestern Germany, was accused of poison. Haunted by her reputation as a witch, Anna stood no chance in the judiciary system of seventeenth-century Protestant Germany. Under torture, she confessed to demonic allegiance, murder, and a list of witchcraft practices, and was condemned to a horrible execution. Hundreds, if not thousands, of old women in early modern Europe shared Anna's tragic fate between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Germany, where the confessional conflicts between Protestants and Catholics raged most ferociously, was ablaze with bonfires of executions.

While the detailed, microscopic, and local studies of witchcraft in early modern Germany are not new (there are more than a dozen fine monographs in the last three decades), The Last Witch of Langenburg distinguishes itself by the sheer amount of historical details that the author has managed to unearth, which he uses to tell a masterly narrative of ordinary peasant folk and their social superiors. For that the historian needs to know the sources. Fortunately, Robisheaux knows this corner of Germany as well as any nonnative is likely to know. From his previous sojourn in the region of Hohenlohe, which resulted in the fine study, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1989), Robisheaux has come to know and appreciate the immensely rich collection of the local archives as well as the charms of the regional landscape.

The stories of Anna Schmieg, her daughter Eva, her husband Hans, her son Michael, and her neighbors and detractors fill volume after volume of judicial records and official correspondence. It all happened on February 20, 1672, Shrove Tuesday, with the sudden death of Anna Fessler, a young mother, a neighbor of Anna Schmieg, and a friend of Eva. Postmortem investigation indicated foul play: poison. Judicial inquiry unleashed a cacophony of accusations, against Anna and her family, and against other women suspected of witchcraft in the region. The authorities arrested Anna and Eva—mothers and daughters were usually linked in witchcraft cases, mala fama—and sought to administer justice. Conscientious men all, the authorities in the tiny County of Langenburg—Dr. Tobias Ulrich von Gülchen, the director of the chancery and chief counselor to the count; court preacher Ludwig Casimir Dietzel; and indeed Count Heinrich Friedrich himself—shared the beliefs of many, if not the majority, of the learned men of their times that the Devil wrought havoc on earth through his minions, wrecking political and moral orders, and that it was the duty of godly princes and magistrates to protect their subjects and root out this incarnate evil. Nonetheless, more and more critical and skeptical voices, questioning the reality of the demonic pact and the witches' sabbath, and criticizing the use of judicial torture, began to be heard in the 1670s, hence the judicial caution on the part of Counselor von Gülchen and the solicitation of expert opinions.

Expert testimonies by the medical faculty at the University of Altdorf and judicial opinions solicited from the law faculties at Altdorf and at Strasbourg reflected the complexity of the case against Anna Schmieg as well as the scruples of the Langenburg authorities. These documents also open up the confined corner of rural Langenburg to the wider intellectual, religious, and political worlds of the Holy Roman Empire. This massive documentation further enables the author to reconstruct not only the lives of Anna Schmieg and her unfortunate family, but also all who came into contact with the judicial investigation. Unlike some studies that focus only on the tragic fates of the victims of the witch-hunts, The Last Witch of Langenburg renders understanding and detailed portraits of Prince Heinrich, Counselor von Gülchen, and Pastor Dietzel, and explains, in succinct summaries, the workings of the legal, political, and religious regimes of late seventeenth-century Germany. Robisheaux is very good at painting a broad canvas for the story of Anna Schmieg: the reader learns about milling, the cattle trade, village gossip, and the harsh life of the rural folk, especially the women. The attentive reader will have noticed at this point that this review has failed to summarize the story of Anna Schmieg. While this is a tragic tale of witch-hunting, there is a twist in the murder plot and a moving epilogue, for which I shall leave the reader to discover in this engrossing and finely written narrative.