Paperback. Blue title with devils and witches image on the cream and blue cover.

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In this study, Professor Trevor-Roper reveals the social and intellectual background to the witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries. Orthodoxy and heresy had become deeply entrenched notions in religion and ethics as an evangelical church exaggerated the heretical theology and loose morality of its opponents. Gradually, non-conformists as well as whole societies began to be seen in terms of stereotypes and witches became the scapegoats for all the ills of society.

Review: Few carry out scholarly reviews like this any more. Trevor-Roper analyzes the witch-hunting craze of Europe (which differed from the American version in several ways), comparing it at times to the anti-Semitism of the 19th century and might just as well have compared it to the Second Red Scare, because the dynamics were so similar. Note that he is not trying to understand why remote village people believe in and fear witches; this is a universal phenomenon. He makes clear in the third paragraph that he will only examine how this universal impulse turned into a general social movement to hunt out and extirpate witches, who seemed only to become more prevalent and more virulent the more ruthlessly they were oppressed.

Anyone looking for comparative literature to understand stigma and out-group persecution should consider this slim but insightful volume. In particular, it serves up parallels to anti-Communism, Islamophobia, and the Culture Wars in our own time.

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, FBA (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. According to John Philipps Kenyon, “some of [Trevor-Roper’s] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men’s books”. Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman wrote that “The bulk of his publications is formidable … Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them … have lastingly transformed their fields.” Conversely, Sisman wrote: “the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed.”

In 1945, British intelligence tasked Trevor-Roper with ascertaining the facts about Adolf Hitler’s demise. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he concluded in The Last Days of Hitler (1947) that Hitler was dead and had not escaped Berlin. In 1983, Trevor-Roper’s reputation was “severely damaged” when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.