Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Robin Briggs' Witches and Neighbors can be both fascinating and irritating at times throughout the book (and often both at once). It is narrowly focused on his own geographic area of expertise, which is the border regions between France and Germany, so readers interested in a pan-European or British examination of witchcraft will have to look elsewhere. For the area that it does cover, it is minutely thorough. This can be both good or bad as there are many, many anecotes used for evidence of the various themes covered in the book but there is no broad perspective presented and defended. The author makes clear his intention to show the complexity of the social construction of witchcraft (which is good) by presenting all of these individual incidents showing that every case can be different from every other case (this can be frustrating for the reader as no general theme emerges to place all of these anecdotes within an historical wev). This book will give the reader some new insights into the complexity of the situation as he tackles other books on similar topics. A fine, yet narrow handling of the social and cultural framework necessary for the growth of the belief in witchcraft.
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