A review of Emma Wilby’s The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Sussex University Press, 2010)
A review of Emma Wilby’s The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Sussex University Press, 2010)

Summary/Abstract: Approaching a book that deals with a single witchcraft case in more than six hundred pages, one may wonder whether poring over such an opus magnum devoted to a single individual’s life and testimony will in the end pay off. That the book in question deals with none other than Isobel Gowdie and her sensationally vivid, viscerally sexual and altogether mindboggling narrative featuring a host of fairy characters, an imposing Devil figure and an astounding plethora of various malefic acts is invitation enough, but one may still feel a certain anxiety as to whether the author’s effort will succeed in the illumination of a single fascinating case only or rather bring to light important insights that might eventually lead to far-reaching general conclusions.

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