Witch, Please: A Cultural History of Women Who Wouldn't Behave

A witty, culturally engaged history of the witch as one of Western society's most enduring and adaptable figures.

The witch has always functioned as a cultural screen onto which societies project their deepest anxieties about women, power, knowledge, sexuality, and autonomy. She emerges whenever female independence becomes unsettling, intelligible, or in need of explanation. She is simultaneously warning, scapegoat, fantasy, and mirror.

Far from being a straightforward story of spells, supers...