ABSTRACT

'Diane Purkiss ... insists on taking witches seriously. Her refusal to write witch-believers off as unenlightened has produced some richly intelligent meditations on their -- and our -- world.' - The Observer

'An invigorating and challenging book ... sets many hares running.' - The Times Higher Education Supplement

chapter |4 pages

Introduction

part I|84 pages

The Histories of Witchcraft

chapter 1|23 pages

A Holocaust of One's Own

The Myth of the Burning Times

chapter 2|28 pages

At Play in the Fields of the Past

Modern Witches

chapter 3|30 pages

The Witch in the Hands of Historians

A Tale of Prejudice and Fear

part II|88 pages

Early Modern Women's Stories of Witchcraft

chapter 5|26 pages

No Limit

The Body of the Witch

chapter 6|32 pages

Self-Fashioning by Women

Choosing to Be a Witch

part III|100 pages

Witches on Stage

chapter 7|20 pages

Elizabethan Stagings

The Witch, the Queen, Class

chapter 8|32 pages

The All-Singing, All-Dancing Plays of The Jacobean Witch-Vogue

The Masque of Queens, Macbeth, the Witch

chapter 9|19 pages

Testimony and Truth

The Witch of Edmonton and The Witches of Lancashire

chapter 10|26 pages

The Witch on the Margins of ‘race'

Sycorax and Others

chapter |10 pages

Conclusion

Bread into Gingerbread and the Price of the Transformation