Take a look at our featured fiction and non-fiction books on witches and witchcraft to celebrate the new exhibition ‘Witches: Suffolk’s Dark Legacy‘ by Suffolk Archives!
The exhibition takes place at The Hold in Ipswich from Friday 16 October until Sunday 21 February 2027, and will feature tours and special events.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
The Manningtree Witches
A.K. Blakemore
England, 1643. Parliament is battling the King; the war between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers rages. Puritanical fervour has gripped the nation, and the hot terror of damnation burns black in every shadow.
In Manningtree, depleted of men since the wars began, the women are left to their own devices. At the margins of this diminished community are those who are barely tolerated by the affluent villagers – the old, the poor, the unmarried, the sharp-tongued. Rebecca West, daughter of the formidable Beldam West, fatherless and husbandless, chafes against the drudgery of her days, livened only by her infatuation with the clerk John Edes.
But then newcomer Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, takes over The Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about the women of the margins.
Cunning Women
Elizabeth Lee
1620s, Lancashire. Away from the village lies a small hamlet, abandoned since the Plague, where only one family dwell amongst its ruins. Young Sarah Haworth, her mother, brother and little sister Annie are a family of outcasts by day and the recipients of visitors by night.
They are cunning folk, the villagers will always need them, quick with a healing balm or more, should your needs require. They can keep secrets too, because no one would believe them anyway.
When Sarah spies a young man taming a wild horse, she risks being caught to watch him calm the animal. And when Daniel sees Sarah he does not just see a strange, dirty thing, he sees her for who she really is, a strong creature about to come into her own. But can something as fragile as love blossom between these two in such a place as this?
The Wax Child
Olga Ravn
It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human.
For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens.
Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, ‘The Wax Child’ is a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.
The Bewitching
Jill Dawson
Alice Samuel might be old and sharp-tongued, but she’s no fool. Visiting her new neighbours in her Fenland village, she suspects Squire Throckmorton’s household is not as God-fearing as it seems and finds the children troubled.
What she cannot foresee is that all five daughters will succumb in turn to a terrifying affliction and accuse her of witchcraft – who else to blame than an ugly, black-capped woman with mysterious healing skills? The Throckmortons’ maid Martha, uncomfortably aware of strange goings-on in the household herself, is reluctant to believe that Alice is a witch.
Yet visiting scholars attracted by the news are convinced, evidence mounts and soon the entire village is swept up in the frenzied persecution of one of their own community.
The Once and Future Witches
Alix E. Harrow
In 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.
But when the three Eastwood sisters join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten ways that might turn the women’s movement into the witch’s movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote – and perhaps not even to live – the sisters must delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.
There’s no such thing as witches. But there will be.
The Witches of Vardø
Anya Bergman
Norway, 1662. A dangerous time to be a woman, when even dancing can lead to accusations of witchcraft. When Zigri, desperate and grieving after the loss of her husband and son, embarks on an affair with the local merchant, it’s not long before she is sent to the fortress at Vardo, to be tried and condemned as a witch.
Zigri’s daughter Ingeborg sets off into the wilderness to try to bring her mother back home. Accompanying her on this quest is Maren – herself the daughter of a witch – whose wild nature and unconquerable spirit gives Ingeborg the courage to venture into the unknown, and to risk all she has to save her family.
Also captive in the fortress is Anna Rhodius, once the King of Denmark’s mistress, who has been sent to Vardo in disgrace. What will she do – and who will she betray – to return to her privileged life at court?
Weyward
Emilia Hart
Kate, 2019. Kate flees London – and her abusive partner – for Cumbria and Weyward Cottage, inherited from her great-aunt. There, a secret lurks in the bones of the house, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century.
Violet, 1942. Violet is more interested in collecting insects and climbing trees than in becoming a proper young lady. Until a chain of shocking events changes her life forever.
Altha, 1619. Altha is on trial for witchcraft, accused of killing a local man. Known for her uncanny connection with nature and animals, she is a threat that must be eliminated.
The Ipswich Witch
David L. Jones
The year 1645 saw the biggest witch-hunt in English history. Faced by the extreme challenges of religious dissent, poverty, sickness and the threat of foreign invasion, Ipswich became an ideological battlefield during the English Civil Wars. Here Puritanism struggled against Catholic sensibilities, the Devil loomed at the door of every English home, and the age of the witchfinder was born.
This book focuses on witchcraft in Ipswich and the most extreme punishment ever given to an English witch, and challenges some stereotypes of the period: reflecting on the growth in Puritan sects, gender politics, the exploitation of the poor, the importance of beliefs in the occult and the rise of English power in the New World.
Ashes & Stones: A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches and Witness
Allyson Shaw
‘Ashes and Stones’ is a moving and personal journey, along rugged coasts and through remote villages and modern cities, in search of the traces of those accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland.
We visit modern memorials, roadside shrines and standing stones, and roam among forests and hedge mazes, folk lore and political fantasies. From fairy hills to forgotten caves, we explore a spellbound landscape.
Allyson Shaw untangles the myth of witchcraft and gives voice to those erased by it. Her elegant and lucid prose weaves threads of history and feminist reclamation, alongside beautiful travel, nature and memoir writing, to create a vibrant memorial.
Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
Malcolm Gaskill
By the spring of 1645, civil war had exacted a terrible toll upon England. Disease was rife, apocalyptic omens appeared in the skies, and idolators detected in every shire. In a remote corner of Essex, two obscure gentlemen began interrogating women suspected of witchcraft, triggering the most brutal witch-hunt in English history.
Witchfinders is a spellbinding study of how Matthew Hopkins, ‘the Witchfinder General’, and John Stearne extended their campaign across East Anglia, driven by godly zeal. Exploiting the anxiety and lawlessness of the times, and cheered on by ordinary folk, they extracted confessions of satanic pacts resulting in scores of executions.
Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials
Marion Gibson
The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018.
ভিতরে Witchcraft, Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions.
It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises.
Something Wicked: The Lives, Crimes and Deaths of the Pendle Witches
Carol Ann Lee
On 20 August 1612, ten people from Pendle were executed before a vast crowd at Lancaster’s Gallows Hill. The condemned and their associates had endured six months of accusations, imprisonment and torture; their treatment was such that one of the group died in Lancaster Castle’s dungeons, while awaiting trial.
Today, a thriving tourism industry exists in and around Pendle, the former home of the so-called witches, yet virtually everything we know about the case originates from a single source: Thomas Potts’ ‘Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches’, hurriedly published in 1613 and distinctly skewed in favour of the prosecution.
Now, Carol Ann Lee brings a fresh perspective to the story by approaching it as true crime. Her research leads to revelatory discoveries, transforming our knowledge of those shadowy figures behind ill-famed names, and the terrible events that befell them.
Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches
Malcolm Gaskill
Helen Duncan – known since childhood as ‘Hellish Nell’, for her uncontainable nature – was one of the most popular mediums of the twentieth century, holding seances around the country where she was believed to manifest the spirits of the dead.
What happens when we die? It was the question of the age for a generation which had endured one world war and now was living through another. Mrs Duncan’s seances offered an answer. But when she started foretelling naval disasters, she also attracted the unwelcome attention of the secret service.
And so just weeks before the Normandy landings, absurdly, anachronistically, she was prosecuted for witchcraft and jailed. Was Nell a conjurer, a martyr or a security risk?
Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth Century Britain
Marion Gibson
If the witchfinders came to your town, who would you have believed – and what would you have done?
With the English civil wars raging in the background, this work reveals how economic uncertainty, religious extremism and deprivation created the ideal conditions for mass witch-hunting in Britain.
Across the country, fear spread rapidly, and neighbours turned on one another in panic. Women and the poor were especially vulnerable, scapegoated by the powerful looking for someone to blame, and hundreds of witch trials across the country soon followed. The hysteria provided a handbook for similar trials to occur around the world, most famously just a few decades later in Salem.
Moving from village to village, Professor Marion Gibson reveals how accusations grew out of everyday tensions – poverty, grief, and resentment – and how entire communities became involved in the persecution of the innocent.
The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World
Malcolm Gaskill
In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. People suffer fits, and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and die.
As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the prickly brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall.
‘The Ruin of All Witches’ tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers’ dreams of love and liberty, of founding a ‘city on a hill’, gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage.
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