The work by lawyer Yakov Abramovich Kantorovich (1859-1925) was publ. in 1896; later, it was republ. several times. It is a review of trials against witches in Russia and in Western Europe.
The main sources were materials of trials and testimonies of contemporaries. In the introduction, the author declared his negative feelings to superstitions and cruelty of judges, who allowed to burn people accused in the witchcraft till the eighteenth century. He glorified science as a real power which stopped that process. The main part of the book consists of nine chapters; there are descriptions of the conceptions of Satan and his power, the procedure of trial and investigation, the state of jails, as well as certain cases against witches in Western Europe and in Russia and the reaction on them, as a phenomenon of the seventeenth century. The author analyzed the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ (Hammer of Witches) and other sources, reflecting the beliefs in devilry. The author noted that the accusations in heresy, from the legal point of view, led to the most severe investigation and punishment – and it was enough to suspect something. In fact, the investigations consisted of tortures. Many women signed any accusations only to escape tortures. Court documents included detailed descriptions of deathly tortures.
The author gives statistics on some centers (villages and cities in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, etc.), and on the general quantity of trials in Western Europe from the fifteenth till the eighteenth centuries. In some places the quantity of victims was up to several thousands; there were even small children of both sexes among them. The author describes the real epidemic of witch hunting and the accepted ways of protect themselves against evil influences.
To reconstruct the historical reality, the author used the testimonies of contemporaries, who were against the inquisition: for instance, Agrippa von Nettesheim and his disciple Johannes Weyer. The later one came to the conclusion, that witchcraft was a product of fantasy, and accusation were made against weak and not mentally healthy women. Although there were no doubts in the existence of devil, according to K., Weyer considered hallucinations and suggestibility of women more real than their conscious agreement with devil.
In Russia there were no bright demonology, on his point of view; and witchcraft was not an object of mass persecutions. But he described some cases similar to European trials, and made an accent at the phenomenon of hikers, wide-spread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In spite of the absence of theoretical conclusions, the book was an important step in the historiography of witch trials, and provided a vast assortment of facts on the topic.