Valerie Kivelson and Christine Worobec devoted a decade to this multi-faceted volume, demonstrating the potential for deeply researched, accessible scholarship through collaboration and meticulous attention to complex linguistic and historiographical challenges. This achievement began at a seminar of five international specialists, including the editors, in Paris in 2010. Aleksandr Lavrov organized the event: “Center and Periphery in the Religious History of Eastern Europe (Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine).” Worobec's and Kivelson's expert translation, annotation, and organization of the initial discussions and sources subsequently gathered led to this 500-page, annotated sourcebook, bringing 900 years’ worth of Russian and Ukrainian sources on witchcraft to English-language readers.

Anyone who teaches about Russia or Ukraine through the imperial era should purchase this book. Kivelson and Worobec survey the international historiography of witchcraft in their Introduction. They explicate each document, providing guidance for any instructor. Maps and a timeline orient non-specialists. Any college or university library should add this to their collection for students researching witchcraft or magic, whatever their regional interest. Faculty who teach in Women's/Gender Studies, History of Medicine, Religious Studies, or Justice Studies/Legal History should be aware of this book's potential for students who wish to learn about the east European phenomena. Scholars of witchcraft in any culture can learn much here about distinctive features of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft practices and official responses.

Part I. Historical Evolution, Law, and Prosecution (13–261) tracks witchcraft's appearances in official sources, eyewitness accounts, law codes, rulers’ decrees, and records from judicial proceedings. Some documents highlight witchcraft as a feature of familiar episodes, including the Andrei Kurbskii-Ivan the Terrible correspondence, the law codes of 1497 and 1649, Peter the Great's Military Statute, and Catherine the Great's Instruction. Others offer delightful discoveries. Loyalty oaths required from court personnel from Boris Godunov's reign through Peter the Great‘s (Item 2.10) suggest Russian rulers’ long acquaintance with and fear of assassination by poison. They include the oath of the keepers of Mikhail Romanov's wardrobe, who pledged not “to put noxious herbs and roots in his clothing or any of his effects… (65),” especially underwear. The complete records of witchcraft trials (162–261) range across geographic regions and social estates.

Part II. Magical Practices, Everyday Matters, and the Power of Words: Trial Excerpts (263–464) presents a taxonomy of magic, with Chapters 5–9 covering such topics as Healing, Sex/Love, and Possession. Chapter 10 traces Orality and Literacy as vehicles for witchcraft; Chapter 11 highlights Specialists in Magic, who appeared in court cases as figures reputed to be experienced, trained practitioners. These records include such gems as “one of the earliest references to the elderly witch Baba Yaga” (408) in 1733, and the transcripts of incantations and spells (including the image of one such confiscated document from the 1680s, Figure 6).

Kivelson and Worobec offer several theses. Among the most salient: 1) Russia and Ukraine shared a common history of Byzantine Orthodoxy, but centuries in the Polish-Lithuanian sphere exposed Ukraine to Latinate institutions. Divergent influences surfaced in witchcraft practices and official church and state reactions. Even so, Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft cultures’ interconnections endured as a “complex skein” (10). 2) Russia differed from western European tradition in the gender of witchcraft; in Russia, men were more frequently accused as witches, healers, and sorcerers. Records reveal that Russian men's mobility across surprising distances facilitated their exchange of practices considered to constitute witchcraft, especially healing with grasses, herbs, and spells. In Ukraine, by contrast, women predominated among the accused at the same rate they did in western Europe. 3) In both Russia and Ukraine, “witchcraft was only loosely associated with the devil” (7), with Satanic pacts largely an imported western concept under Peter the Great. 4) Witchcraft trials and investigations across the period are marvelous apertures into the development of Russian formal law and judicial procedures. The transition from the medieval and early modern ubiquity of torture by church and state agents to the rationalist, self-consciously Enlightenment-inspired procedures and verdicts from Catherine the Great forward is striking. Documents from lengthy investigations demonstrate how seriously the state took witchcraft as a threat and how many resources the state was willing to devote to detecting and deterring it.

This treasure trove of sources, many published here for the first time, is the product of a collective quest. Non-specialists gain access here primarily due to mutually respectful scholarly collaboration across national borders. Kivelson and Worobec impeccably acknowledge their colleagues’ contributions, from the Dedication to their “esteemed colleagues, Kateryna Dysa, Olga Kosheleva, Aleksandr Lavrov, and Elena B. Smilianskaia,” to their thanks to colleagues who located a given source in an archive. Frequent statements such as “Dmitry Gnevashev kindly tracked down documents…in a Vologda archive” (xix), and “We are grateful to Elena B. Smilianskaia for sharing her transcription of the archival file and her notes with us” (Item 7.4, 340) remind readers of each researcher's contributions.

Kivelson and Worobec succeed in making the obscure immediate and palpable. They include vibrant details—sometimes horrific, as in the case of the peasant woman in a Polish border village who confessed to hiding her illegitimate, witchcraft-potion-aborted stillborn in the manure of a pigsty in 1753; she was brought to trial after the partially-devoured baby's remains were discovered (176–77). As editors, they try to make the esoteric comprehensible: “The ‘semiuncial [ecclesiastical] script in vermilion and black ink’ that drew the investigator's eye in the first entry below indicated a high-cultural form of written expression, one generally limited to members of the clergy….” (436–37). This level of detail runs the risk of overwhelming undergraduate students, but it creates a valuable resource for non-specialists and instructors who want to assign the documents. Across regions, centuries, and social estates, Worobec and Kivelson use their introductory essays to orient readers to the socio-political context for each source. Readers receive a mini-course in the dynamics in each period of Russia and Ukraine's history.

Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 brilliantly fulfills our academic mission: research, teaching, and disseminating knowledge.