Witchcraft: A History (Dark Histories) Paperback – March 1, 2004 by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
 
From ancient times to the present, the aged, ugly crone has worked her evil magic and been burned at the stake by an outraged authority, or cured her neighbors and their animals with the help of gentle herbs and beneficent spells. Such, at any rate, is the popular picture. But not much of that picture is true. Many witches were young; many witches were men. Witches were not universally persecuted or tortured, and the period they were most at risk covered less than 100 years. So much more interesting than the cartoon stereotype, the real witch was a complex figure whose genuine story is only now starting to be unravelled.
 
From Publishers Weekly
In this third volume of the Dark Histories series (edited by William Naphy, who also wrote the first installment, Sex Crimes), witchcraft expert Maxwell-Stuart looks back at witchcraft from its early practitioners in ancient Greece and Rome, to the medieval witch trials, to modern-day Wiccans. As he explains, the very idea of witches and the "magical crimes" of which they might be accused varied over the centuries. In the Greek and Roman worlds, magic was "ubiquitous," but its practitioners lacked a coherent ideology; modern-day Wiccans, on the other hand, focus on beliefs (e.g., pantheism and neo-paganism) rather than practice. Maxwell-Stuart does an especially fine job of considering the relationship between the early Christian church and pagan magic, demonstrating that initially, magic was accommodated into the church’s developing theology; only later did magic and heresy become nearly synonymous. Scholarly but eminently readable, this is a sophisticated introduction to a fascinating subject.
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