In recent years the outpouring of historical work on witchcraft has been prodigious. Twenty-first-century studies encompass every conceivable chronological and geographical area, from antiquity to the present, Massachusetts to Muscovy. Approaches have been varied, with witchcraft explored as an intellectual, legal, political, social, cultural, and psychological phenomenon. Of particular interest – and difficulty – is the ‘reality’ of witchcraft: how historians might recover contemporary meanings, beyond the meanings imposed by rationalists, romantics, and social scientists. This article examines nine books from the last five years to assess the state of the field, and to offer some suggestions for research in the future.

Historical and literary studies of the history of the book and of reading habits in modern Anglo-American history tend to approach their subject either from the perspective of readers and publishers or from that of authors. The former works constitute a nascent historiography, addressing the problem of how the material book was used to create and replicate culture; the latter studies are more concerned with how literary authors used texts to influence and negotiate culture. This article critically reviews the two bodies of scholarship and identifies the importance of copyright and reprinting; it comments on the value of transnational or other broad studies as opposed to specific investigations of a particular canonical text or local publishing/reading community.