Part history, part feminist memoir, part travelogue, Witch Hunt provides a personal guide to the witch trials in western Europe and America and explores how their legacy continues to affect women today. A confluence of political, economic, and religious factors in the early modern era inspired witch hysteria to ignite like wildfire in Italy, France, England, and northern Europe, which would then go on to follow early colonists into America. At the heart of these accusations were warped ideas about the supposed evils of female sexuality and the female body. Women were often named as the driving force behind the influx of “witches” in these communities, and they were disproportionately punished for it. The European and American witch hunts between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries are usually glossed over in American schools, although this time period greatly informs our ideas about who and what witches are. This lineage of oppression remains an important and often overlooked reference point through which we can contemplate women’s rights—and human rights—in the Western world and beyond. In Witch Hunt, Kristen Sollee, a second-generation witch herself, retraces the steps of the famed witch hunts of Europe and America, taking the reader on a journey that is grim and yet empowering, even joyful. This heathen’s guide to history, often irreverent and playful, is written with reverence for those who suffered through the darkest of times. Witch Hunt isn’t only an exploration of the horrors of history but also surveys how the archetypal witch has been rehabilitated.
