This important collection should be of interest to almost all readers of this journal. There have been countless book-length studies, and no few general surveys, of the history of European witchcraft and witch-hunting from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. The historiography of witchcraft, however, has received much less attention, and always in journal or encyclopedia articles, or as sections within books. This is hardly unusual. Book-length historiographies are rare. Yet the historiography of witchcraft is exceptionally fascinating. As the editors note, few other topics have engaged so directly with so many different methods and approaches to doing history. Especially given that much of the work in witchcraft studies is relatively recent (the field really came alive in the 1970s), the number of major methodological problems confronted (and contested) is impressive.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/michael_bailey/18/
This is a book review from Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 3 (2008): 81, doi:10.1353/mrw.0.0098. Posted with permission.