Despite the subtitle on my copy - James I and the English Witch Hunts - which lead me to expect more of a focus on the detail of James I of England/VI of Scotland's involvement in witch trials, this is more a general study of the witchcraft persecutions in both England, Scotland and the Continent, with an acknowledgement of the later outbreak in Salem. As such it is a good grounding in the subject with an examination of the way the persecutions focused on women and used women's supposed inferiorities as an explanation of their predilection to direct malice against others, form pacts with the devil, etc.

The author also mentions various men who were sceptics - I knew of the most famous, Reginald Scot, whose 'The Discoverie of Witchcraft' drew the ire of King James because of its massive debunking of the witch craze - but not of the others.

The book does give the impression at the beginning of being an in-depth examination of the case of the Flower women who were accused of bewitching the sons of the Duke of Rutland, with tragic consequences. In practice not a great deal of the book is devoted to this case, partly due to the fact that, despite its being unusual in involving a favoured nobleman and his wife as accusers rather than village compatriots, the court papers were destroyed in the early 19th century by a clerk who decided everything prior to 60 years previous could be junked as useless and the only source is a sensationalist pamphlet which went into several editions as a best seller.

That was probably the biggest lesson taken away from the book for me, that our understanding of history is fragile and fragmentary, given the existence of vandals such as this - so many records have been lost and we don't know what really happened. That is the case with the Flowers also - it isn't known, for example, if the mother, Joan, really called for bread in an attempt to prove her innocence and choked or if her death was due to mistreatment by her captors. So I found this an interesting book, but a little disjointed in terms of where its focus lay and accordingly a 3 star read. ( )

didn't finish it. couldn't. spurious connections, jumping back and forth, never telling the actual story. ugh ( )

I've always been a fan of popular history but this is another example, like too many others I've read recently, of a poorly edited and constructed book. It purports to be an account of one particular notorious 17th century witch trial but that case takes up a very small part of the book. Instead, it is mostly a history of witch trials and the social and political reasons for their proliferation at that time. This becomes tedious due to huge numbers of repetitive extracts from period documents describing the activities of witches and the methods used to uncover and punish them.
The most interesting parts of the book deal with a wider account of James 1 and his reign and the court intrigues and in-fighting between the various aristocratic families, in particular the family of Francis Manners who were involved in the Belvoir castle witch trial. ( )

Unfortunately, although this book had a lot of local interest, being about events that took place at Belvoir Castle and in neighbouring Bottesford, it was really repetitive and annoying to listen to.

If I had been reading a paperback copy I could have skipped past the repeated descriptions of what kind of people were suspected of being witches, to the bits that were actually about the Manners family and the women they accused of killing their young sons by witchcraft, but that is much harder to do when you are listening to an audiobook, so I gave up part way through chapter 6.