HOW TO KILL A WITCH A GUIDE FOR THE PATRIARCHY

**** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER **** WINNER 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards Blackwells Scottish Book of the Year Fascinating and illuminating, this book tempers the justifiable rage with sharp and funny pinpricks to the pompous. VAL MCDERMID, author of Past Lying As well as highly entertaining read, How To Kill A Witch is a tour de force of research, understanding and compassion. PROFESSOR SUE BLACK, author of All That Remains. 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 At a time when womens rights are once again being threatened across the globe, this book could not be a more timely read if it tried. SHIRLEY MANSON, Garbage Two of Scotlands most vivid storytellers. THE TIMES Fascinating, angering THE MAIL ON SUNDAY 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 womens 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