Finished Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill

>3/5 stars, decent overall but not for me.

>Surprisingly in-depth and clearly well researched with a large number of individuals and cases covered. But I found it a bit boring to read and tried to read it quickly so I could move on to something else. There are only so many times you can read about women being searched for weird body parts and confessing to being suckled by imps before it gets a bit repetitive. The book argues that the chaos of the English Civil War, with the seemingly natural order of things going wrong allowed the witch hunt craze to begin. Prior to the civil war the paranoia was there but most witch trials went nowhere due to the legal demands for proof. The main witchfinders Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne are presented as catalysts that turn the paranoia into a witch hunt. The main reason presented for the witch hunts is genuine belief combined with guilt, as many of the accused witches were poor older women who had been refused aid. There is a lot of old woman asks for something, is refused, then bad things happen to the person who refused them (such as family or livestock getting ill or dying) which leads to the accusation. One thing I did like about the book was the financial side of things, as it turns out witch hunts were very expensive which is one of the reasons why they declined.

Now reading A Fiery & Furious People: A History of Violence in England by James Sharpe. About a third of the way through it and I am really enjoying it, so despite it being over 600 pages I am reading it fairly quickly and should have it finished by the end of the week.