

This second edition includes an extended section on the witch trials in England, Scotland and New England, fully revised and updated introductions to the sources to include the latest scholarship and a short bibliography at the end of each introduction to guide students in their further reading. Levack shows how notions of witchcraft have changed over time and considers the connection between gender and witchcraft and the nature of the witch's perceived power. Including trial records, demonological treatises and sermons, literary texts, narratives of demonic possession, and artistic depiction of witches, the documents reveal how contemporaries from various periods have perceived alleged witches and their activities. Catholics and Protestants alike feared that the Devil and his human confederates were destroying Christian society. During these years the prominent stereotype of the witch as an evil magician and servant of Satan emerged. Many of the sources come from the period between 14, when more than 100,000 people - most of them women - were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America. The Witchcraft Sourcebook, now in its second edition, is a fascinating collection of documents that illustrates the development of ideas about witchcraft from ancient times to the eighteenth century.
