How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women
Calling all ‘quarrelsome dames’! Podcasters Venditozzi and Mitchell take their popular Witches of Scotland work into book format. In an entertaining and accessible style, the authors review the history of Scottish witches and witch trials, with their focus firmly on the missing history of the frankly enormous number of women who, through the centuries, lost their lives after being accused of witchcraft.
This is an entertaining and informative book that also acts as a warning. The authors ask us to consider these women as just that – women. Perhaps old, perhaps a little old, or lonely, perhaps unwanted or inconvenient or unwell, but recognizable, and all but forgotten victims. They also don’t stop back in the days of James VI & I but take the reader into modern times. It’s fascinating to learn that a woman was sentenced under the 1735 Witchcraft Act in Britain as recently as 1951, for example, and the authors strongly link the past treatment of women to threats to women’s freedoms in modern life. Their call to arms to ‘quarrelsome dames’ asks us all to think about women’s rights, and it’s an effective question to pose against this background of historical atrocity. For further information and sources for their research, the authors provide a select list of resources at the end of the book, but don’t pass on their entertaining footnotes.
