This book examines the lives and careers of possibly the most sadistic group of people of the 16th and 17th centuries, the “great age” of witch-hunting in Europe and North America. From the doyen of witch-hunters, the Jesuit del Rio, to the British Matthew Hopkins, not to mention Pierre de Lancre, a judge who was responsible for burning 600 women, P.G.Maxwell-Stuart charts the progress of these fierce and dangerous zealots, while providing an insight into the world they perceived as evil and which they sought to destroy.