Malcolm Gaskill Books in Order

This history examines the life of medium Helen Duncan, whose claimed contact with the dead divided believers and skeptics. Her wartime prosecution under Britain's Witchcraft Act reveals the fears, spiritual beliefs, and suspicions surrounding her unusual career.

Examining witchcraft, counterfeiting, and murder, this study explores what criminal prosecutions reveal about ordinary people's beliefs in early modern England. Legal records illuminate changing cultural assumptions and the social meanings attached to crime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Following seventeenth-century migrants across the Atlantic, this history examines how English settlers changed America and were changed by it. Letters and contemporary records reveal their ambitions, dependencies, and evolving relationship with a homeland facing its own upheavals.

In a seventeenth-century Massachusetts settlement, illness and misfortune fuel accusations of witchcraft against a brickmaker and his wife. Their family's tragedy reveals how religious belief, neighborhood tensions, and personal resentment could transform suspicion into persecution.