Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2001, this highly-acclaimed first edition chronicled the rise and fall of witchcraft in Europe between the twelfth and the end of the seventeenth centuries. Now greatly expanded, the classic anthology of contemporary texts reexamines the phenomenon of witchcraft, taking into account the remarkable scholarship since the book's publication almost thirty years ago.

Spanning the period from 400 to 1700, the second edition of Witchcraft in Europe assembles nearly twice as many primary documents as the first, many newly translated, along with new illustrations that trace the development of witch-beliefs from late Mediterranean antiquity through the Enlightenment.

Trial records, inquisitors' reports, eyewitness statements, and witches' confessions, along with striking contemporary illustrations depicting the career of the Devil and his works, testify to the hundreds of years of terror that enslaved an entire continent. Thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Thomas Hobbes are quoted at length to determine the intellectual, perceptual, and legal processes by which "folklore" was transformed into systematic demonology and persecution.

Together with explanatory notes, introductory essays—revised to reflect current research—and a new bibliography, the documents gathered in Witchcraft in Europe vividly illuminate the dark side of the European mind.