Review: How To Kill A Witch, by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi

Description
As a woman, if you lived in Scotland in the 1500s, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch. Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women’s fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning.

Inspired to correct this historic injustice, campaigners and writers Claire Mitchell, KC, and Zoe Venditozzi, have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree. In order to understand why it happened, they have broken down the entire horrifying process, step-by-step, from identification of individuals, to their accusation, ‘pricking’, torture, confessions, execution and beyond.

With characteristically sharp wit and a sense of outrage, they attempt to inhabit the minds of the persecutors, often men, revealing the inner workings of exactly why the Patriarchy went to such extraordinary lengths to silence women, and how this legally sanctioned victimisation proliferated in Scotland and around the world.

With testimony from a small army of experts, pen portraits of the women accused, trial transcripts, witness accounts and the documents that set the legal grounds for the hunts, How to Kill A Witch builds to form a rich patchwork of tragic stories, helping us comprehend the underlying reasons for this terrible injustice, and raises the serious question – could it ever happen again?

My Review

Thanks to Anne of Random Things Tours for organising this tour and to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book.

This book covers the background and events of the 16th to 18th centuries witch hunts in Scotland. Using documents, fictionalised pen portraits of people involved, folklore, and interviews with subject specialists, they share their passion for remembering the people, 80% women, who were murdered by the state and their neighbours, as witches. The also look at witch murders in the 21st century and the potential for the same conditions to produce another ‘witch hunt’, perhaps this time of another vulnerable population.

Claire Mitchell is a K.C. and Zoe Venditozzi is a novelist and journalist. Neither are historians, however, they do know how to research and talk to a lot of historians, folklorists, and subject specialists. This is useful. Sometimes the subject specialists aren’t very good at sharing their knowledge with a general audience. It sometimes requires people who are passionate about a subject to translate the specialist stuff into a readable popular history or science book.

The authors do a really good job of doing that. The book is entertaining and really easy to read. Packed with information and facsimiles of original documents, with translations, it is a good resource for teachers, perhaps, explaining certain historical events and contexts.

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