The Middle Ages get a bad press in all sorts of areas. In the history of witchcraft, the idea of zealous medieval inquisitors consigning an old crone to the flames because of the slander of a neighbour and a reputation as a ‘wise woman’ is well established — and not always true.
In fact, the witch trials and witch crazes of Europe and North America were a product of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when men, having cast off the shackles of medieval superstition, became convinced through all the best and most scientific of arguments that there really were witches in their midst and resolved to burn them out. Think of the treatment of magic in medieval romances as compared to Shakespeare and Jacobean drama. In the former, there is magic, but it is fantastical — magical, no less. But as we enter Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain, magic moves from the realm of fantasy to a
