Rating: 
Summary: Witch is Woman
Review: As others have written, Barstow's book lazily glosses over exceptions to her theory of witch-hunting as woman-hunting. I find this book to be disappointing on an academic level and a personal level. The most common figure one will find in this book lies in the quantitative data presented at the back of the book -- 75%. According to Barstow's sources, around 75%-80% of the people tried and killed were witches. Was there a bias against women? Certainly. Much like the bias against women that made them likely to be mystics of affective piety (something which few men ever were declared). Was witch-hunting woman-hunting? No way. Witch-hunting crossed gender lines, class lines, and religious lines. If witch-hunting were woman-hunting, we should see 100% listed for female prosecutions and executions across the board. To claim otherwise is to cheapen the deaths of thousands of men in a way that, quite frankly, disgusts me. In simple terms, Barstow seems to be unwilling to do what talented academics like Ginzburg demand that we do -- discriminate on the basis of microhistory. If you want to get a good grasp on witch-hunting, read Kors & Peters' compilation of primary source materials ("Witchcraft in Europe,") Edward Peters' "Inquisition," Joseph Klaits' "Servants of Satan," Wunderli's "The Drummer of Niklashausen," Hsia's "Myth of Ritual Murder," Ginzburg's "The Night Battles" and any other book that treats the subject with respect.
Rating: 
Summary: an insult to those who suffered
Review: As others have written, Barstow's book lazily glosses over exceptions to her theory of witch-hunting as woman-hunting. I find this book to be disappointing on an academic level and a personal level. The most common figure one will find in this book lies in the quantitative data presented at the back of the book -- 75%. According to Barstow's sources, around 75%-80% of the people tried and killed were witches. Was there a bias against women? Certainly. Much like the bias against women that made them likely to be mystics of affective piety (something which few men ever were declared). Was witch-hunting woman-hunting? No way. Witch-hunting crossed gender lines, class lines, and religious lines. If witch-hunting were woman-hunting, we should see 100% listed for female prosecutions and executions across the board. To claim otherwise is to cheapen the deaths of thousands of men in a way that, quite frankly, disgusts me. In simple terms, Barstow seems to be unwilling to do what talented academics like Ginzburg demand that we do -- discriminate on the basis of microhistory. If you want to get a good grasp on witch-hunting, read Kors & Peters' compilation of primary source materials ("Witchcraft in Europe,") Edward Peters' "Inquisition," Joseph Klaits' "Servants of Satan," Wunderli's "The Drummer of Niklashausen," Hsia's "Myth of Ritual Murder," Ginzburg's "The Night Battles" and any other book that treats the subject with respect.
Rating:
Summary: Witchcraze
Review: As some previous reviews have noted, Barstow's nook is easy to read. Unfortunately, that is about all that can be said in its favor. More scholarly books may be a little "drier," but they are also MORE RELIABLE. Barstow's argument that misogyny is solely responsible for witch trials does not hold up well when examining the evidence she presents; another reviwer has already noted that she ignores Iceland simply because it doesn't fit into her theory. She doesn't seem to acknowledge that while misogyny helped set up the mindset of witch-hunting, it doesn't explain everything. Were the Irish of the 17th century so much less misogynistic than the Scots? Hardly---yet Ireland has only a handful of witchcraft cases, Scotland thousands. Hmmm..perhaps misogyny was ony *part* of the picture! But Barstow's theory doesn't account for that possibility, so she ignores it.Barstow does not distinguish between "sex-specific" and "sex-related" accusations. In other words, gender may be a key contributing factor, but not the ONLY factor. If she wants a woman-hunt, why not look at scolding or infanticide trials?(crimes that could, by definition, ONLY be perpetrated by females.) I suspect the answer is that such crimes are not "sexy," nor could she pass off her work as scholarship in those fields. But there is such a keen interest in this topic that she can use her gifts as a writer (it *is* quite readable) to fool her readers into thinking this is good scholarship. Look *carefully* at the way she presents her evidence and you will start to see the holes in her approach...how does she account for the differences amongst the rates of witch trials in culturally similar countries? How does she account for the fact that witch trials in England, for example, were so spotty? According to her argument, they should have neatly risen and fallen in accordance with the waxing and waning of misogyny. Was the 18th century really so much less "misogynistic" than the 16th? As an historian working in this timeframe, I can't see how she could possibly make sucha claim! Perhaps the greatest crime in this approach is that it lulls us into a false sense of security about the witch-hunting mentality. We need to understand how times of social tension can turn other factors (misogyny, religious fear, etc.) into a witchhunt, By making it simple, she actually makes it arder for us to understand how such hunts could occur. If you are hungry for information about the witch trials, please avoid this book, as slick and sexy as it is. I wouldn't ever give it to my university students to read, nor to any interested reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Author's bias- the bane of the history student!
Review: I first read this book last year when I began studying Early-Modern Witchcraft at Monash University. Barstow's work was misleading then when I knew little on the topic, and laughable now that I know much, much more. Barstow had a pre-conceived idea of what she she wanted to say, and either didn't bother to find, or omitted anything that didn't fit in with her theory. This book says more about feminist politics than Witchcraft history. Gender was the primary focus of her study, and Barstow's world is only understandable in terms of gender (as opposed to the equally important socio-economic, religious and racial factors). Furthermore she believes that only women have gender, this shows an appaling lack of study for more and more accounts are appearing, not only of male witchcraft, but of male gender history. Witchcraft was too widespread and went on for too long to be so easily pidgeon-holed into terms as obvious or basic as gender. Historical representations of witchcraft should be taken on a case by case basis. Creating "models" for witchcraft (Barstow's elderly, marinalised female among others) does not help the issue, it confuses it. Anyone starting out serious study in this field would do better to read works by Dianne Purkiss, Deborah Willis or books pertaining to the case in Salem of Hugh Parsons who was the primary witch, his wife the secondary-where does this fit in to Barstow's model? Also, if you must read Barstow- also read the possession at Loudun(Certeau's or Rapley's) to see a witch trial that is the exact opposite of Barstows "norm". To fellow scholars I'd say read Barstow if only to see how one's political agendas or bias can effect your study. Be objective, keep reading and get all sides of the story!
Rating:
Summary: Author's bias- the bane of the history student!
Review: I had to pick a book to do for History. I read this book and it seemed okay. Then I sat and thought about how it was so against men. How it showed men being the accusers more than women, when in fact, it was almost the opposite. I don't recommend this book to anyone. It gives you somewhat of an overview as to what took place during the witch trials in Europe, but take it serioulsy. The facts are seriously distorted.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible Representation of History
Review: I had to pick a book to do for History. I read this book and it seemed okay. Then I sat and thought about how it was so against men. How it showed men being the accusers more than women, when in fact, it was almost the opposite. I don't recommend this book to anyone. It gives you somewhat of an overview as to what took place during the witch trials in Europe, but take it serioulsy. The facts are seriously distorted.
Rating:
Summary: A desperate portrait of the great witch hunts.
Review: I took a course that investigated witch trials, and found this book to be the absolute most informative and responsible investigation. While Barstow is not claiming misogyny to be the single cause of the European "witchcraze" (as some would believe), she looks at misogyny as key feature of the trials. Her claim is that the arrival of witch trials in Europe presented a means for misogynist acts to take place. In many regions (particularly central Europe) women were specifically targetted for their sins: lustfullness, weak-mindedness, greed, temptresses, sexual infidelity, etc. Women were being targeted in large numbers because they were women. Widows and spinsters were seen to be the most dangerous by the people in charge (men). In areas (Russia) where women weren't so highly targeted, there were other societal mechanisms of misogyny. Also, women weren't seen as capable to perform magic as men. Barstow sees the witch trials as a past expression of the ! continuing woman-fearing and hating that occurs in our world. Though more subtle forms continue today, she cites that we remain in a world with female-genital mutilation in Africa and wife-burning in India. Widespread rape and wife-beating in the USA would be another form of this. The witch trials were a particularly disturbing form of historical misogyny in early modern Europe. The witch trials were a phenomenon in which the majority of victims were women. Most scholarly accounts tend to ignore or gloss-over this fact. This original account offers much of which is missing in the rest of the literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Useful overview that gets to the heart of it
Review: I've read the other reviews which consistantly deny Barstow's premise: that the Witch Craze was the women's holocaust. Just read the book: and any other that attempts to break down by gender the numbers of those tortured and killed. Why gender? Because it is the single most glaring pattern in the witch persecutions!
The Maleficius (handbook for persecuting witches) does not implicate male sexuality as a reason for torturing them, as it consistantly implicates women's sexuality. It does not mention how to 'recognize' male witches, but it begins from the premise that women 'live by the moon and so are able to draw the hearts of men toward the pagans,' and thus, witches are women because only they were 'weak' enough to fall prey to the devil. Interesting, isn't it, how the artists and writers of the period always portray witches as women, from Shakespeare to Holbein? Don't blame Anne Barstow, just look for the overwhelming pattern, as she has done.
That said, there are a few weaknesses in the book. One, although she tries to nail the number of those killed, she still comes up short. Anecdotally, I visited the town of Osnabruck, Germany, this summer and discovered their numbers of murders of women were around 400, give or take, from two eras of persecution in the 16th and 17th Centuries. I returned home to check Witch Craze, and Osnabruck never made it into the index. It's numbers of dead are not included, though it is common knowledge to anyone who visits the tourist center. Huh? What else was left out?
Nor does Barstow adequately plumb the numbers who were tortured and maimed and then released, or those who died in custody. She does not draw a line from the witch persecutions to the rise of the legal profession. We know that women were targeted for political and sexist reasons, but Barstow does not go into detail about who the male witches were: were they shamans, convenient scapegoats for natural disasters, homosexuals, or political enemies of the nobility? Don't know.
I await a book which discusses the intersection of European pagan life and the witch craze. I believe that while Europe's women may not have been sorcerers, they, and small town folk in general, certainly were among the last people of the continent who maintained the pagan folk traditions of pre-Christian Europe. Traditionally, throughout native cultures, men are first to shed their traditional ways, usually for pragmatic economic reasons, while rural women carry the rituals on: though food preparation, childcare and healthcare methods, costuming, commemorating holidays, and so on. Is there some corollary there between native European culture as practiced by householders and the witch craze? Not mentioned, and doesn't have to be. But to my mind, it is an incomplete work that doesn't mention the collision of historical folk culture with the dominant christian culture and how it effected or affected the persecution of women.
Yet Witch Craze is an important book to read and own. Barstow's single most important contribution, I believe, is to paint a picture of how women and men would have reacted to 500 years of mostly female persecution--the resulting fragmentation of society, the housewifeization of women, the entrenchment of ageism, and the suspicion and fear of self-directed mysticism and spirituality--these are the legacies of the Witch Craze that imprint us all still.
Rating:
Summary: Dry look at a fascinating subject
Review: My interest in witchcraft is non-academic, but I still found this book to be incredibly dry and suffering badly at the hands of the author's biases. I have lots of my own feminist beliefs, but Ms. Barstow is so far left of me that she practically falls off the map.
This book is meticulously researched, and the author delights in proclaiming it to be so about every few paragraphs. I found it distracting that Ms. Barstow would offer a bit of information from someone to illustrate a point, then go on to tell the reader why the original author was completely wrong in their deductions. The very best of the best non-fiction writers manage to cull the truth from their sources, filling in any blanks with information from others and from educated guesses, while at least respecting the original source. Ms. Barstow seems to like using sources only so she can point out how foolish they are and why they're not to be believed.
The numbers and statistics used here are unreliable, if only because the author herself can't decide what's accurate and what's misleading. Instead of presenting her educated opinions (and I know she's very educated), she drops a knot of statistics in the reader's lap and lets them try to figure out where the truth is. What could be illuminating and horrifying recounts of witchcrazes are instead bland and lifeless commentaries; by focusing on sheer numbers and not on the human stories, Barstow effectively numbs the reader to any real emotional sense of the witch hunts.
I happen to agree with the author that there's an element of hatred towards women behind the witchcraft accusations and that it shaped the punishment the convicted received. I disagree that entire history of witchcraft can be blamed on misogyny and I found the tone of this book getting shriller chapter by chapter. In glossing over the cases of men and children caught up in the hunts, the author inevitably lessens the total emotional impact; by turning it into strictly a case of men fearing women and seeking to keep them inferior, the larger societal issues of the time are ignored.
The research and obvious passion for the subject by the author are remarkable, although the dry presentation reads more like a narrow textbook entry than an exhaustive study of the subject.
Rating:
Summary: highly recommended
Review: Reading the previous reviews that have been written on this book, I was disappointed, but not really surprised. Saying that this wasn't a women's holocaust because 100% of the people tortured & executed weren't women is like saying Hitler's holocaust in WWII against the Jews wasn't Anti-Semitic because 5 million of the 11 million people murdered weren't Jewish. Hatred does not have boudaries. I don't know if it's ignorance, denial or backlash that causes people to come to these conclusions, but it just goes to show the that we have not come as far as we may think we have....
With that said, I'd like to say that this book was excellent. Not sugar coated or sensationalized, this book shed some light on what happened in 16th & 17th century Europe, and how these events still effect us today.
Finally these women, men and children who were murdered out of ignornace, fear and hatred, have their story told.
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