This is a book more focused on description than analysis. Far from being a criticism, the statement identifies the book's great strength. Malcolm Gaskill has mined the archives, pamphlet literature, and other sources for the largest (indeed the only truly large) witch hunt in early modern England: that conducted by the notorious witchfinders Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne mainly in 1645 and 1646. Gaskill presents a straightforward narrative of the many trials in which these two men were involved, with extensive digressions to provide necessary context and background information. The events he recounts are gripping, and so is the prose in which he tells his story. Gaskill's target audience quite obviously includes the general reader, as well as the student and the scholar, and he has produced an extremely readable book. Tension between popular and academic history is to some degree unavoidable, but Gaskill handles it well, and to good effect.Gaskill stresses that England in the mid-seventeenth century was, for numerous reasons, a society in turmoil, and that the world for many was turned upside down.

The great strength of his book is that it captures this world, evocatively conjuring it into life for the general reader, and reminding the expert that the numerous factors that may have underlain witch trials never operated in isolated but rather interconnected and overlapped to create the conditions from which particular trials might erupt.Gaskill gives us perhaps the most complete account of these events that is possible, and by moving into the probable, he presents a rich and useful insight into the world in which witchfinders were able to operate.