Dictionary of Witchcraft

Book excerpt: This acclaimed 180,000-word A-Z dictionary is a comprehensive and highly readable guide to witchcraft, revealing the historical reality beneath the popular stereotypes of old hags, broomsticks, and black cats. Complete with biographies of notorious witches and descriptions of their covens, familiars, spells and practices, it also contains colourful accounts of infamous trials and all the associated paraphernalia of witch-hunting, torture and persecution across Europe and colonial America. A first-class source book for the historian, folklorist and casual reader alike, it shows in vivid and bloody detail how witchcraft hysteria swept the western world in the post-medieval period and has continued to resurface into modern times.