How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women

Novelist Venditozzi (Anywhere’s Better Than Here) and lawyer Mitchell, cohosts of the Witches of Scotland podcast, provide a droll and gruesome history of Scotland’s witch trials. Organized like a macabre how-to, the book recounts each step of a witch trial, from how to identify a witch like a professional “witch pricker” to how to bury one in a manner that avoids creating a “revenant” who returns from the dead. The authors cite contemporaneous documents—from King James VI’s “textbook on witch-hunting” to accused witch Isobel Gowdie’s four “fantastical” confessions of a tryst with the devil—as well as interviews with scholars, activists, and even a fire expert, who explains “what it takes to dispose of a human body using fire.” The grim material is leavened with wry humor (“See it, say it, sorcery”), while the most moving sections are the profiles of the accused, among them a 16th-century woman suspected of “using a cat to invade people’s dreams,” and the last woman tried under the Witchcraft Act (in 1944!). While the authors consider other factors that contributed to witchcraft hysteria, from poverty to religious zealotry, they show how women, who made up 85% of the accused, were “viewed as difficult, foolish, and sexually dangerous,” making them “perfect targets for... society’s fears.” It’s a lively tribute to the past’s persecuted women and “quarrelsome dames.” (Sept.)