Witch Child

Unfortunately, the same type of prejudice and hatred follow her across the Atlantic and even in her new home she becomes the object of suspicion and eventually persecution. She tries to live a decent life, helping others when she can, making friends with some Native Americans and at least trying to appear to be normal, but narrow-minded bigotry runs rampant through the settlement and a settled life is something she will not be allowed.

The story is quite well done and gives a good, more personal insight into the era of the witch-hunts when women and even men were hunted down for being different, tortured and executed. Although the exact numbers killed will never be known, it is known that about 85% of those killed during the witch-hunts were women and at least 250,000 women were killed (the high-end estimate runs to some 9 million killed). The situation was so bad that some villages in Europe were left with almost no women at all.

In addition, the cats the women kept were killed (they were seen as familiars, "evil" spirits kept by witches) and this lowered the cat population. This is important because when the rats carrying the Bubonic Plague entered Europe, there were no longer as many cats as there had been and thus it was much easier for the rat population to spread and spread the disease (which killed somewhere between one-forth and one-half of the population of Europe).

Many of the women accused of being witches were basically herbalists, women who knew the uses of herbs and healing methods and helped heal people; such women generally lived alone and were thus easier to heap suspicion upon since they had no one to defend them. These women actually knew more about healing then did the so-called doctors of the day whose answer to most problems was "bleeding" people, attaching leeches to their bodies to such out "bad" blood.

Thus, the bigotry and hatred spawned in the churches resulted in the deaths of literally millions of innocent people (between those actually killed and those who died in the plague). Witch-hunting was also profitable, of course (a fact the novel points out) and the church and local leaders could make money off of hunting and "exposing" witches and seizing their property.

The book has a sequel, Sorceress.

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