In his marvellously insightful memoir History in the Making, Sir John Elliott remarked on one of the biggest changes that affected his field during a long career. ‘It seems at times’, he observed, with a tinge of acidity, ‘as if the study of early modern Europe has been reduced to a study of its witches.’ It was a point well made. There is an apparently insatiable demand for books on the subject, both popular and scholarly. Moreover, writing about witchcraft has changed. Particularly since the publication of Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997), more and more historians have sought to account for witchcraft beliefs from the inside. This means taking what was once seen as irrational superstition on its own terms and seeking to understand what it might have been like to believe that witches were real.

Yet if early modernists seem preoccupied with issues of belief and work hard to understand ways of thinking that seem terrifically alien to us now, the same cannot generally be said about historians of more recent periods. ‘Thinking with Christians’ would involve suspending secular assumptions, and imagining a world in which God were active and the Bible an authority that gives a unique insight into how to act. In all sorts of ways, it is easy to imagine peasants or men in ruffs shaped by such ideas and very much harder to think of these beliefs influencing more recent figures.

The historian Sarah Williams is an important exception to this trend. She made her name as the author of a notably sensitive and imaginative exploration of popular religion in modern London. That was a scholarly work; this one is a much more accessible piece of writing. It is framed as