Godly zeal and furious rage : the witch in early modern Europe /

Quaife (University of New England, New South Wales, Australia) has written a serious study of early modern European witchcraft. The book was published almost simultaneously with Brian Levack's The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (CH, Sep '87), which displays scholarship of a somewhat more widely ranging sort. The two studies are more complementary than competitive. Both deal with the period from 1450 to 1700 or 1750, but Levack gives less attention to witches and witchcraft itself than to the mechanism of the witch-hunt as a social, political, and economic phenomenon in all regions of Europe. Quaife's study mainly concerns Western Europe; its two chapters on the apparatus of witch-hunting are heavily outweighed by an emphasis upon the presumed witches and their accusers. The ``godly zeal'' of the book's title was the zeal of a political establishment seeking its own security. Greater emphasis, however, is on the ``furious rage'' of frustrated neighbors who could blame their misfortunes on local witches. The work is well written and organized. Comprehensive, unannotated bibliography; chapter endnotes; adequate index; no illustrations. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-H.S. Vyverberg, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale