Following the success of 2024’s Witchcraft: A History In Thirteen Trials, Marion Gibson’s focus moves closer to home, and the British witch trials of the 1600s. Where her previous book explored similar farragos from across the globe, Witchland: A Tale Of Witch Hunting And War In Seventeenth Century Britain places the focus squarely on the English Civil War, and what uncertainty, poverty and violence does to the psyche of a nation.
Gibson contextualises the trials excellently in this book, showing that witchcraft accusations were less often superstitious flights of fancy than made in desperation, with ordinary people and seedy opportunists turning ordinary people into scapegoats to explain the disarray of a nation and their own misfortune. Rather than focusing solely on the aggressors, such as the infamously cruel Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, the author focuses on the people who lost their lives and livelihoods because they were falsely accused of a crime that is impossible to commit.
By combining a detailed picture of the context, the trials took place in, and naming the victims, imagining who they were and the way they lived, Gibson paints a picture more heartbreaking than any fictional account ever could: a world of fear, exhaustion and injustice.
