WITCH-HUNTING IN CELTIC SOCIETIES

There is much in this emerging consensus that is convenient to historians of Scottish witchcraft. It suggests that there was no such phenomenon as Gaelic witch beliefs per Se: there were only Scottish witch beliefs, which can be studied as a unitary whole. Nor does it leave historians of the subject with any compelling reason to consider fairy beliefs and other aspects of broader folklore, or to engage in comparative studies with other Celtic societies. In brief, it has certain obvious attractions as well as powerful arguments in its favor, but the question is whether it is in fact sound. Hutton tries to answer that question, raising in the process issues that have implications for the study of attitudes to witchcraft in the British Isles as a whole, and indeed in a continental European and even in a global context.