How to Kill a Witch

'Fascinating and illuminating, this book tempers the justifiable rage with sharp and funny pinpricks to the pompous.' VAL MCDERMID, author of Past Lying'Serious and angry, but so completely accessible, How To Kill A Witch is a work of real historical investigation and a fierce warning for our times.' MALCOLM GASKILL, author of The Ruin Of All Witches'Two of Scotland's most vivid storytellers.' THE TIMESAs 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.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.