"In the past two or three decades, however, many historians have turned their attention to more reliable source materials on the witch hunts -- the local records of trials and executions stashed away in hundreds of small towns across Europe and Great Britain. As the historian Jenny Gibbons has pointed out in her admirably lucid 1998 essay "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt," this is hard work, sifting through vast amounts of dull documents written in archaic and often frustratingly obtuse language, but it's the sort of thing real historians do. And it's given us a radically new picture of what Europe's witch hunts were like.

Lyndal Roper's "Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany" isn't the first such book to explore this new front of witch hunt scholarship, although it is one of the most recent. But it is representative, and as such it doesn't offer a version of history that features a big, clear, satisfying story with an obvious villain. Like other studies -- Robin Briggs' "Witches and Neighbors" and Brian Levack's "The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe" are two of the best known -- it is crammed with little stories: squabbles among neighbors, resentments within families, disagreeable local characters, the machinations of small-time politicians and the creepy psychosexual fixations of magistrates and clerics...

The mass of detail can be numbing, but what it reveals is important: not a sweeping, coordinated effort to exert control by a major historical player, but something more like what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." Witch hunts were a collaboration between lower-level authorities and commonfolk succumbing to garden-variety pettiness, vindictiveness, superstition and hysteria. Seen that way, it's a pattern that recurs over and over again in various forms throughout human history, whether or not an evil international church or a ruthless patriarchy is involved, in places as different as Seattle and Rwanda.

As a professor of early modern history at Oxford, Roper takes for granted several historical facts that may nevertheless be unfamiliar or surprising to the average reader. One concerns the diversity of the persecuted people. Some 20 percent of the Europeans tried for witchcraft were men. (This varied from nation to nation; in Iceland, 90 percent of the accused were men.) In some cases, including one that Roper covers in depth, the accused were children.

The peak of the craze occurred not in the Middle Ages, when witchcraft was dealt with rather leniently, but a couple hundred years later. The practice had effectively died out by the late 1700s, but Roper also describes a particularly brutal trial that happened in 1745. The total number of Europeans killed is generally thought to be 40,000 to 100,000. (It's not clear where Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code," got the figure of 5 million, since 9 million is the incorrect number more commonly bandied about.)

There's more. The Inquisition was not greatly involved in witch burnings; it had its hands full with Protestants and other heretics, whom the church shrewdly perceived to be a far more serious threat to its power. In fact, while the justification for condemning witches was religious, and some religious figures joined in witch hunting campaigns, the trials were not run by churches of any denomination. They were largely held in civil courts and prosecuted by local authorities (some of whom were also religious leaders) as criminal cases...

According to Roper, Germany in the late 16th century was a place where marriage and children were difficult to attain. Laws prevented people from marrying unless they could demonstrate their ability to support a family, and illegitimate pregnancies were harshly punished. To be a wife and mother was to have scored a privileged station in life -- and to be the object of much envy. Witches, especially elderly women, people believed, were motivated by jealousy and spite, seeking terrible revenge for minor slights and begrudging young and fertile women the blessings they could no longer enjoy themselves...
"It's important to note here that the belief that envy toward the more fortunate could be transformed into a curse -- basically, the evil eye -- can be found in tribal cultures all over the world. A woman whose child dies or who mysteriously finds herself unable to produce milk, can deflect the (unreasonable) blame that might be attached to herself by fingering a person who's low in the village pecking order. The evil eye is not a particularly Christian idea, and early on the church actually discouraged members from clinging to old folk beliefs in magic and evil sorcerers because they were inconsistent with church doctrine...
Of course, many times the local church authorities participated enthusiastically in the persecution, but in most cases, the community itself started it. The church used trials and demonology texts that detailed and classified diabolical behavior to impose order on the chaotic paranoia of villagers looking for scapegoats for their own misfortunes. Most of us have heard that Christianity incorporated such pagan and folk traditions as the winter solstice festival (Christmas) and the spring festival (Easter) into the Christian calendar. There's every reason to believe that -- far from seeking to eradicate folk beliefs in black magic -- Christian churches took advantage of ancient superstitions by stepping in to offer themselves as a solution to the mischief done by evil sorcerers. No wonder the witch hunts got bloodier when Catholics and Protestants were competing for followers...

"None of this excuses the Catholic and Protestant churches for the many atrocities they've perpetrated over the centuries, against "witches" or anyone else who earned their disfavor. But it's also a caution against idealizing a pagan past about which we know next to nothing. The pagan cultures that have left records have proven themselves every bit as capable of misogyny and of senselessly brutalizing outsiders and misfits. As human beings, pagans were just as capable of barbarity as monotheists; and as human beings, women can be just as wicked as men, given half a chance.

The history of the witch hunts also offers a caution against reflexively glorifying the "community" offered by small towns and villages when the bonds of such communities are too often cemented by tormenting their marginal members. This perhaps is the most chilling thing about the stories Roper has gleaned from the antique documents she has unearthed in so many small German towns: their ordinariness...
"It is difficult to comprehend the sheer viciousness of the way villagers and townsfolk attacked those they held to be witches," Roper writes. Then again, if you've ever lived in a small community, is it really that difficult to see how they got started in that direction, if not how they managed to get so far? It may take a village to raise a child, but history also keeps telling us that it takes a village to burn a witch..."  Edited notes on Who burned the witches? http://dir.salon.com/books/review/2005/02/01/witch_craze/index.html: A book review of Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany" By Lyndal Roper. Yale University Press.