As numerous regional studies have shown, there is no single explanation for the late medieval witch hunts. In general terms, witchcraft scholarship is divided between those who emphasize the popular beliefs and social interactions that led to suspicion and accusation, and those who, like Laura Stokes, ask why elite rulers and judges decided to pursue judicial action. In this important and concise book, Stokes provides a comparative analysis of witchcraft prosecution that includes regions that pursued the activity and those that did not. By restoring witch trials to their wider judicial context, she clarifies how these related to the prosecution of other crimes, and she plausibly explains the clearly varying histories of judicial prosecution among her three case studies of Nuremberg, Basel, and Lucerne. In the process she also reveals intersecting prosecution patterns among witchcraft, sodomy, and theft. Finally, she highlights why magistrates decided to loose their judicial machinery on alleged perpetrators of magic as a threat to civic order during the first century of witchcraft prosecution, 1430 to 1530.

In population size and political structure Stokes's cities are comparable, although there are helpful differences: Lucerne and Basel joined the Swiss Confederacy, while Nuremberg was an Imperial Free City. Moreover, only Lucerne remained Catholic during the Protestant Reformation. Each community followed a different path to criminal punishment: Basel experienced a peak in judicial severity in the middle of the fifteenth century, followed by a turn to mercy, while Lucerne witnessed a “horrifying crescendo” in torture and executions that coincided with its first witchcraft trials and continued into the sixteenth century. Nuremberg, like Lucerne, became preoccupied with the reform and punishment of moral transgressions, yet its magistrates avoided Lucerne's severity. In Lucerne especially there was considerable bleeding of elements from one category of crime to another, so that thieves or sodomites began confessing to diabolical doings, or witches to sodomy. This last crime, Stokes notes, encompassed bestiality, a crime that magistrates feared for both its polluting effects and for the anger of God that it would provoke. Both Lucerne and Basel increased the prosecution of sodomy over the century, although Basel's magistrates soon began to mimic the royal prerogative of mercy to enhance their authority. The pattern of sodomy and witchcraft trials saw one set of victims replace the other over the course of the sixteenth century, leading to the breakdown of the rigidly gendered nature of witchcraft as more men were accused of this crime than in the early trials. In contrast, Nuremberg's city fathers adopted a stance of legal skepticism toward witchcraft, despite Heinrich Kramer's efforts in the 1480s to persuade them otherwise. Coupled with their growing doubts about the effectiveness of torture in extracting the truth, Nuremberg's magistrates concluded that witchcraft beliefs were mere madness afflicting only the ignorant. Even so, Stokes reminds us that Nuremberg's magistrates were not immune to conspiratorial thinking as their sad history of anti-Semitism makes clear.

Stokes also appreciates recent studies of how fears of vagabonds, arson gangs, and heretical groups increased the credibility of large-scale conspiracies among political elites. Since her loose cut-off date of 1530 was only five years into the vicious Anabaptist persecution, Stokes does not fully explore prosecution patterns between such heresy and witchcraft. Yet she too reveals how elements drawn from one set of confessions could easily be adapted and applied to the interrogations of other groups of criminals. Hence, thieves added diabolism and/or sodomy to their confessions, and witches could take on the sectarian elements of heresy. Stokes also addresses why some magistrates became passionate about civic and religious reform that encouraged moral cleansing, while others asserted control over their urban and rural communes by other means, and with profoundly distinctive consequences for their residents.

Thanks to her text's clarity and relative brevity (at under 200 pages), the various threads of Stokes's intriguing tapestry hold together quite nicely, resulting in a provocative analysis of great import to scholars not only of the witch hunts, but for all interested in crime and punishment, urban governance, religious and civil reform, and early modern mentalités in general. If Stokes's book inspires further efforts at comparison that shed as much light on the dark recesses of witchcraft prosecution as hers does, the field will be immensely enriched.