In 1750, three men appeared before the presbytery of Tain, charged with a series of assaults. In one post-midnight rampage, they had attacked three separate households, roughing up six women and one man. They dragged several of the women out of bed and threw them on the floor, calling them “witches and devils,” ripping and taking pieces of their clothing and scratching them on their foreheads until they bled. At least one of the women was repeatedly punched. The men apparently thought they were taking action in response to a previous magical attack. One of them, John Monro from Obsdale, blamed some or all of the women for the respiratory disease that would eventually kill him. He saw himself as a classic victim of maleficia, and in an earlier era, might have found a sympathetic audience in the presbytery. Not so this time: he and his confederates were given public rebukes in their home parishes for this “grievous scandal.” While this might strike modern readers as a light punishment, Lizanne Henderson, recounting the event in Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment: Scotland, 1670–1740, demonstrates that it represents a change in thinking among the ministers and elders of the presbytery. Rather than investigating the allegations of witchcraft, as so many ministers and elders had in the previous 190 years, they, in Henderson's words, “were clearly siding with the supposed witches rather than the alleged victims,” and condemned the latter for, in the presbytery's words “recourse to diabolical means and methods, so contrary to the faith” and giving Christianity a bad name (144–45). Witchcraft itself had ceased to be a capital crime, having been recategorized as a type of fraud in a statute applying throughout the United Kingdom in 1735.

This case comes toward the end of, and few years after, the period under study in Henderson's book, but it is representative of one of her central claims: that belief in witchcraft persisted well into and through the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly among the common people in rural communities. The Scottish witch-hunt itself ended in the early eighteenth century, having gradually declined for several decades as lawyers and judges lost faith in the legal system's ability to identify and punish witches and as central government officials took control over witchcraft cases away from local courts. This trend (and its causation) has long been established in the various works of Brian Levack. But Henderson's focus is on those farther down the social and institutional ladder: ministers, elders, and, ultimately, the men and women who inhabited Scotland's villages and hamlets, particularly in the rural southwest, from which much of her material (but not the above example) comes.

One of Henderson's primary lenses is “folk belief,” a concept that, despite her criticism of Peter Burke's model of popular culture, was something not really shared by eighteenth-century intellectuals, even if they were aware of some of its facets. This belies the claim in her conclusion that the “mood of suspicion and terror” that nurtured witch-hunting “continued to linger among many Scots at all levels of society” (321). There is little evidence presented here, apart from a repeated assertion about James Hogg, for that belief among educated professionals (a group to which Hogg did not necessarily belong) by the mid- to late-eighteenth century. By then and among them, belief in magic, harmful or otherwise, was the province of folklore, and they collected and catalogued such beliefs in works which form a substantial part of Henderson's source base. But those beliefs about witches, fairies, and other elements of enchantment were still strong among their rural compatriots.

The Scottish witch-hunt has been well studied, starting (in the modern era) with Christina Larner's Enemies of God (1981), Levack (in various articles, many of them collected in Witch-Hunting in Scotland [2008]), Stuart MacDonald in The Witches of Fife (2002), and studies by Julian Goodare and others associated with the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft at the University of Edinburgh, perhaps best represented by the collection edited by Goodare (to which Henderson contributed) The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (2002). Henderson's Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment includes an exhaustive descriptive bibliography of Scottish demonology and its witch-hunt, starting with works published in the late seventeenth century (37–57). What is less explicit is where this particular study fits into that intellectual edifice, although Henderson suggests that general works on the witch-hunt, such as Larner's, neglect the eighteenth century. This is presumably because their focus is on witch-hunting rather than folk belief. Thus, this appears to be more an extension of coverage than a corrective to earlier studies.

Henderson writes that she is influenced by David Hufford's “experienced-centered approach,” laid out in his 1982 study of the “old hag” tradition in Newfoundland, The Terror that Comes in the Night. Thus, she cautions that we need to take seriously the accounts of those who had experiences we might regard as supernatural; they may have been describing events that they were certain actually happened. This sits uneasily alongside her passionate tone elsewhere, as when she describes two women convicted of witchcraft as “martyrs to the petty-mindedness of their neighbours, a pitiless kirk and a merciless state” (310). While we rightly would condemn the actions taken against them if attempted today, those petty-minded neighbors or pitiless ministers and elders may have felt genuinely under supernatural assault. Historians of early modern religion might also question Henderson's labeling of those who were pursuing witches as “fundamentalist men” (10), given Christian fundamentalism's roots in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North America. Nonetheless, this is a useful study of a society undergoing disenchantment, which demonstrates that the enchantment was, like the ostensible plague victim in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), “not dead yet.”