JONATHAN BARRY is Senior Lecturer in History and Head of School at the Department of History, University of Exeter, UK. OWEN DAVIES is Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. His previous publications include Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003).

'Eleven distinguished scholars have contributed to this volume of essays, each surveying the key works that exemplify a particular way of approaching the multi-faceted problem of interpreting the history of witchcraft and witch trials...provides excellent signposts through a very tangled forest.' -Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore

• Introduction; J.Barry & O.Davies The Contemporary Historical Debate 1400-1800; P.G.Maxwell-Stuart Science, Medicine and Witchcraft; P.Elmer The Nineteenth-Century: Medievalism and Witchcraft 1800-1914; C.Tuczay The Reality of Witchcults Reasserted: Fertility and Satanism; J.Wood The Witch-Craze as Holocaust: The Rise of Persecuting Societies; R.M.Toivo Culture Wars: Religion and Acculturation; M.Nenonen The Return of the Supernatural; W.de Blecourt Crime and the Law; B.P.Levack Thinking Witchcraft: The Linguistic Turn and Intellectual History; M.Gibson Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychoanalysis; K.Hodgkin The Social Anthropology of Witchcraft: Rationality and Function of Beliefs; R.Jenkins Writing Witchcraft: The Historian's History, the Practioner's Past; J.Pearson-Overend