Jeffrey Barton Russell's book Witchcraft and Witches in the Middle Ages attempts to answer the question of what constitutes a witchcraft phenomenon. A phenomenon that for centuries has owned the minds of many people from an ignorant peasant to a sophisticated philosopher, which led to torture and claimed hundreds of thousands of human lives, according to the author, cannot be an illusion or general insanity. To eradicate evil in the modern world, a person must know what forms it took in the past, when people, guided by the gospel commandments, built the state on bones.