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At the heart of this tale of murder is a depressingly familiar story: the cantankerous sixty-year-old Anna Schmieg, feared for her foul curses and ill temper, wife of a miller in the beautiful countryside of southwestern Germany, was accused of poison. Haunted by her reputation as a witch, Anna stood no chance in the judiciary system of seventeenth-century Protestant Germany. Under torture, she confessed to demonic allegiance, murder, and a list of witchcraft practices, and was condemned to a horrible execution. Hundreds, if not thousands, of old women in early modern Europe shared Anna's tragic fate between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Germany, where the confessional conflicts between Protestants and Catholics raged most ferociously, was ablaze with bonfires of executions.
While the detailed, microscopic, and local studies of witchcraft in early modern Germany are not new (there are more than a dozen fine monographs in the last three decades), The Last Witch of Langenburg distinguishes itself by the sheer amount of historical details that the author has managed to unearth, which he uses to tell a masterly narrative of ordinary peasant folk...