The sinews and bones of wide-flung Celtic civilizations of Europe were casualties of that war, a holocaust that modern scholars call the Inquisition, that feminist scholars name the Burning Times - a war waged primarily against women, whose positions in matrilineal or matriarchal and historically polytheistic cultures opposed - by their existence - the strictly hierarchical, unabashedly sexist construct of the conquering Roman Catholic Church.

Where are their stories, the people of the Burning Times? Author Jess Wells, in her new novel, The Mandrake Broom, gives voice to some of them: healers, wise women, bold men, people of conscience and true science who lived ordinary or extraordinary lives, who died nobly or ignonimously, slaughtered by armies of god or felled by the plagues resulting from the Churchs vast ignorance and disastrous pogroms to rid Europe of witches, their consorts, and their familiars the cats.