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A witty, culturally engaged history of the witch as one of Western society’s most enduring and adaptable figures.
The witch has always functioned as a cultural screen onto which societies project their deepest anxieties about women, power, knowledge, sexuality, and autonomy. She emerges whenever female independence becomes unsettling, intelligible, or in need of explanation. She is simultaneously warning, scapegoat, fantasy, and mirror.
Far from being a straightforward story of spells, superstition, or folklore, Witch, Please takes you on a tour of the many women who have earned the title of Witch, from ancient healers revered for their knowledge to those burned at the stake to modern Etsy witches. Across literature, art, and eventually film and television, the witch repeatedly mutates between monster, crone, seductress, and comic relief, revealing more about each era’s assumptions than any stable “truth” about witchcraft itself.
These competing versions of the witch—radical, commercial, nostalgic, performative—sit uneasily alongside one another, underscoring the figure’s continued cultural volatility. But across these shifts, one argument remains constant: Societies create witches when they need them.
Simon Leyland is a British author, historian, and professional collector of gloriously useless facts. A former City trader who exchanged financial markets for archives, libraries, and obscure footnotes, he writes narrative history with the firm belief that the past is far too entertaining to be left solely to academics.
He is the author of The Men Who Stare at Hens, A Curious Guide to London, and several other works exploring the stranger corners of history, language, and culture. His writing combines meticulous research with dry English humour, examining the peculiar habits, improbable beliefs, and magnificent absurdities that have shaped human civilisation.
Simon lives in the depths of the Norfolk countryside, where he spends an unhealthy amount of time pursuing obscure historical anecdotes, reading books that sensible people abandoned centuries ago, and convincing himself that “just one more source” is a perfectly reasonable way to spend an afternoon.
Introduction: A Woman Alone Is a Dangerous Thing
Chapter 1: Before the Pointy Hat — Goddesses, Shamans, and Women With Opinions
Chapter 2: The Medieval Witch Who Didn’t Exist (Yet)
Chapter 3: The Witch Trials — When Fear Acquired Paperwork
Chapter 4: Satan, Sex, and the Male Imagination
Chapter 5: Fairytales — Teaching Children to Fear Old Women
Chapter 6: Witches on Stage and Screen — From Macbeth to Marvel
Chapter 7: Feminism Reclaims the Broomstick
Chapter 8: The Instagram Witch and the Business of Enchantment
Chapter 9: Why the Witch Won’t Die
Conclusion: We Are Not Done With Her Yet