Michelet brilliantly recreates the Europe of the Middle Ages, the centuries of fierce religious intolerance, the Inquisition and the auto-da-fe.

He depicts the feudal barons, the great manors, the fiefs and serfs... and the witches, hobgoblins and wizards of whom the masses lived in mortal fear.

Michelet draws flaming word pictures of the witch hunts, the Black Masses, the reign of Satan, and the weird rites of the damned. Here is the age of unbridled pleasure and sensuality, of luxury beyond imagination and squalor beyond endurance. Here is the time when a girl might be accused of witchcraft merely if she were young and pretty and did not survive the test of immersion in water or boiling oil. Here is the day of beatings, floggings, tortures and summary decapitations.

Encyclopedia Britannica called the book, "The most important work on medieval superstition yet written." It is indeed one of the great works on the Age of Darkness.