ABSTRACT
Witchcraft beliefs and the practices arising from them have been a prominent topic in anthropological monographs because they frequently, but by no means invariably, are a dominant interest for the primitive peoples whose institutions anthropologists have mostly studied. Historians of pre-industrial European society have also, it is true, written about the subject but they have seldom attempted to make it, as Dr. Macfarlane has done in this book, a central theme in their descriptions of the thought of a period. Indeed this is, I suppose, the most detailed, as it is also certainly the most sociological, inquiry into witchcraft yet made by an historian.
