The history of a unique reign of terror. A thoroughly readable book on the lives and careers of possibly the most sadistic group of people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the 'great age' of witch-hunting in Europe and North America. From the doyen of witch-hunters, the Jesuit del Rio, to the British Matthew Hopkins, not to mention Pierre de Lancre, a judge who was responsible for burning 600 women, Maxwell-Stuart charts the progress of these fierce and dangerous zealots, while providing an insight into the world they perceived as evil and which they sought to destroy.