THE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT. By the Rev. Montague Summers. (Routledge.
12s. 6d.)—Mr. Summers has done a great service to history by compiling a detailed and comprehensive account of Witchcraft. As he says in his preface : " It is quite impossible to appreciate and understand the true lives of men and women in Elizabethan England, or in the Italy of the Renaissance, unless we have some realization of the part that Witchcraft played in those ages." This book emphasizes the vast and elaborate organization of the witches in the West up to the end of the seventeenth century. We need not concur in the writer's beliefs in the reality of diabolic agencies, and with the interpretation he places upon the fact of " possession " both in the witches of old times and in the spiritualists of to-day, but we are indebted to him for the painstaking and original research which he has undertaken in this obscure and neglected by-path of history.
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