Title: How to Kill a Witch

Author: Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi

Genre: Nonfiction

Publisher: Monoray

Publication Date: 15th May 2025

Rating: 5/5

Cover:

Summary:

As a woman, if you lived in Scotland in the 1500s, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch. Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women’s fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning.

Inspired to correct this historic injustice, campaigners and writers Claire Mitchell, KC, and Zoe Venditozzi, have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree. In order to understand why it happened, they have broken down the entire horrifying process, step-by-step, from identification of individuals, to their accusation, ‘pricking’, torture, confessions, execution and beyond. 

With characteristically sharp wit and a sense of outrage, they attempt to inhabit the minds of the persecutors, often men, revealing the inner workings of exactly why the Patriarchy went to such extraordinary lengths to silence women, and how this legally sanctioned victimisation proliferated in Scotland and around the world. 

With testimony from a small army of experts, pen portraits of the women accused, trial transcripts, witness accounts and the documents that set the legal grounds for the hunts, How to Kill A Witch builds to form a rich patchwork of tragic stories, helping us comprehend the underlying reasons for this terrible injustice, and raises the serious question – could it ever happen again?

Review:

Being a Scottish woman myself, I’m a little bit familiar with Witches of Scotland and what they’ve been working for, plus I’m deeply interested in the Scottish witch trials in general and the reasons why Scotland had such a disproportionately high number of them. So this book immediately appealed to me and happily I can say that it totally lived up to my high expectations. I loved everything about it – How to Kill a Witch is the perfect blend of wit, sensitivity and an in depth look at the historical and social context of witch trials and why women were overwhelmingly the most common victims of them. The book is humorous at times but never lets the reader forget the incredibly crucial fact that these women, and some men, were real people who were persecuted often simply for being ‘other’ or not fitting neatly into the box that society wanted to force them into. 

The stories of individuals on both sides of the witch trials are slotted in throughout the book, and whilst these small sections are technically fiction, there has been a clear endeavour to research and uncover as much as is possible about this turbulent period of history. Unfortunately it is not an easy task, in part because throughout time, women’s lives have generally never been as closely recorded as men’s lives, especially men with power. Yet, the authors have managed to paint a vivid and authentic picture of the oppression, and the reasons behind it. If you have any interest at all in history, feminism, or witchcraft then I couldn’t recommend How to Kill a Witch more highly. I found it illuminating and depressingly relevant. 

★★★★★

Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

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