Jeffrey Burton Russell has sure written a lot about witchcraft and also about the history of the Devil– so I suppose he can be forgiven for citing his own other books in the bibliography.

This slim, elaborately illustrated volume is clearly meant to be one of his more “consumable” books, aimed at the lay person. I suspect it is meant almost as a condensation of his longer, more academic works. 

A lot of the scholarship seems pretty solid, but he makes some assertions that I would love to see citations for (for example, that British “cunning folk” regularly collaborated with witchfinders and bear some responsibility for the executions of witches!). 

The section on “modern witchcraft” is fairly dated, and deals mostly with Wicca in the ‘70s. 

Overall, however, this is a good read. I appreciated Russell’s genuinely agnostic take– it is rare to find a scholar who is not into witchcraft himself who is so sympathetic to the practice of witchcraft. I also deeply appreciated his survey of striking similarities between witch lore the world over, and his admission that the reasons for these similarities remain largely unknown.