Witchcraft: A Graphic History — Squire & Salsi Hardcover

Short description:

Witchcraft: A Graphic History by Squire and Salsi is a richly illustrated hardcover that traces the history of witchcraft from ancient times to the modern era. Packed with fascinating imagery, historical context, and cultural perspective, it’s an engaging read for anyone curious about the deep roots and evolution of the craft.

Description:

Quick Specs

• Authors: Lindsay Squire and Lisa Salsi
• Format: Hardcover, 128 pages, 6.69 x 9.06 inches
• Publisher: Leaping Hare Press, 2024
• Series: Graphic MBS History
• Best for: Visual learners, history of witchcraft readers, fans of illustrated nonfiction, gifts for witchcraft practitioners

Witchcraft History Told Through Illustration

Most histories of witchcraft are dense text-based surveys: chapters of academic prose covering persecution, folklore, trial records, and the slow emergence of modern Wicca. This book takes a fundamentally different approach. Lindsay Squire, a practitioner of eclectic Witchcraft known for her Instagram presence as @thewitchoftheforest, and Italian illustrator Lisa Salsi deliver the history of the practice through graphic storytelling, combining rich visual narrative with concise, informative text. The result is a book that can be read in an evening but remembered for much longer, because the illustrations carry the material in a way pure prose cannot.

The visual entry point is Biddy Early, the 19th-century Irish wise woman and folk healer who lived from 1798 to 1874 in County Clare. Early was one of the first practitioners of the nameless art to appear in the historical record by name, largely because the fears surrounding folk magic had previously made documentation nearly impossible. Through her story, and through the character of a young woman named Lindsay who seeks out Biddy's knowledge, the book traces the broader arc of witchcraft's history: the roots of plant wisdom and folk healing, the social and religious stigma that surrounded practitioners, and the persistent survival of these traditions across centuries of suppression.

From Ancient Roots to Modern Revival

Squire structures the book to move outward from Biddy Early's story into larger historical and thematic territory. Readers encounter the connections between witchcraft and green magic, eco-spirituality, feminist traditions, and the figure of the wise woman healer who operated outside formal religious and medical structures. The book covers how those traditions were stigmatized, how practitioners were persecuted, and how the underlying knowledge survived through oral tradition, herbalism, and community healing practices that outlasted every attempt to suppress them.

Salsi's illustrations are drawn in a warm palette dominated by greens and oranges, giving the book a cohesive visual identity that suits the earthy, plant-rooted traditions at its center. Reviewers have noted the illustrations are the book's greatest strength, doing work that straightforward historical prose rarely can: conveying mood, atmosphere, and the texture of a life lived in a particular place and time. This is a witchcraft history book that works as an art object as well as a reference. Browse my witchcraft and spellcraft books collection for more titles in this tradition.

How to Read Witchcraft a Graphic History by Squire and Salsi

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I stock this book because it does something genuinely rare: it makes the history of witchcraft accessible and visually beautiful without stripping out the parts that matter, the persecution, the survival, the feminist and eco-spiritual dimensions that give this tradition its weight. Squire is a practitioner who knows the material from the inside, and Salsi's illustrations give the book a presence that text-only histories can't match. It was shortlisted for the British Book Design Awards. If you want to pair it with something more practice-oriented, browse my full books collection for complementary reads.

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