Satanism and Witchcraft (book)

According to Michelet, medieval witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism and the Roman Catholic Church.

Michelet's account dwells on the suffering of peasants and women in the Middle Ages, and writes that history should concentrate on ‘the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions’ put him ahead of his time as a writer of micro-history.

[2] Michelet was one of the first people to attempt to give a sociological explanation of the Witch Trials, and interprets the source material very literally.

The first and most famous part is an imaginative reconstruction of the experience of a series of medieval witches who led the religion from its original form of social protest into decadence.

[5] Today, the book is regarded as being largely inaccurate, but still notable for being one of the first sympathetic histories of witchcraft, and as such it may have had an indirect influence on Wicca.