The First Witches

A surprising, imaginative and wonderfully researched book that changes the history of witch hunting. It transports us magically to the terrifying, haunted world of medieval Ireland, but always remembers that its long-ago people were human like us. Delightfully, it also tells us how to read urine, the meaning of fire and what to do about elf cake. A real treasure of a book.

Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials

The First Witches is a brilliantly detailed account of the persecution of a woman for witchcraft, 300 years earlier than the English witch hunts. It’s a fascinating addition to our knowledge and a joy to read about a woman who gets away!

Philippa Gregory, author of Normal Women

Clear-sightedly dispels many modern myths around medieval witches, and reveals compelling human stories, its meticulous research always lit by imagination and compassion. Anthony Bale takes us inside a medieval world which is both deeply strange and powerfully close and immediate.

Catherine Clarke, author of A History of England in 25 Poems

Fascinating, unsettling, and deeply humane, The First Witches asks not simply who the earliest medieval witches were, but how the idea of the witch itself emerged. The book centres on – but roams far beyond – the charged world of fourteenth-century Kilkenny, where local rivalries, religious fears, and political power struggles converged in the prosecution of Alicia Kyteler and her family. Brilliantly researched and compellingly told, the book reconstructs a remarkable human story while illuminating a decisive turning point in the history of the witch. Chilling and thrilling in equal measure.

Erin Goeres, author of Nineteen Days in Autumn

Deeply researched and eye-opening. Anthony Bale brings us into a world where magic, religion and superstition were inseparable from power, injustice and fear. What emerges so powerfully is that witch hunts were never simply about belief: they were also about conflict, authority and who was vulnerable enough to be caught in the middle. And when that person was a woman, the consequences could be deadly. Compelling, unsettling and beautifully researched.

Estelle Paranque, author of Blood, Fire and Gold

The First Witches is a lyrical, compelling and masterful account of how the roots of the Early Modern European witch craze can be found in fourteenth-century Ireland. Through nuanced and humane engagement with his sources, Anthony Bale renders a medieval witch trial timely and urgent to twenty-first-century readers, as an example of toxic masculinity in a settler-colonial context.

Elizabeth Boyle, Author of Fierce Appetites

Part history and part mystery, The First Witches is a delight. Bale artfully reveals the spectacular (and at times mundane) events and ideas that would result in the burning of witches across Europe, even as so humanely keeps his focus on the very real people subjected to the terror of a witch hunt.

 Matthew Gabriele, co-author of The Bright Ages and Oathbreaker