In medieval Kilkenny, wealth could protect a person, but it could also make them dangerous.

Alice Kyteler was no ordinary woman. Born into privilege, married more than once, and surrounded by money, inheritance disputes, suspicion, and resentment, she became one of the most infamous figures in Irish medieval history. In 1324, she was accused of sorcery, heresy, poisoning, blasphemy, and consorting with a demonic familiar. Her name entered the records not simply as a woman suspected of witchcraft, but as the centre of a case that exposed fear, power, church authority, family bitterness, and the brutal limits of justice.

The Story of Alice Kyteler follows the remarkable and unsettling case of the Kilkenny woman whose trial became one of the earliest and most important witchcraft prosecutions in Europe. It examines the world that shaped her, the men who accused her, the bishop who pursued her, the servants who suffered in her place, and the deadly consequences of a charge that could destroy anyone caught beneath it.

This is not a tale of fantasy or invention. It is the story of a real woman, a real city, and a real trial that blurred the line between religion, law, politics, inheritance, and fear. At its heart lies a disturbing question: was Alice Kyteler a dangerous practitioner of forbidden arts, or a powerful woman made monstrous by those who wanted her ruined?

Dark, atmospheric, and historically grounded, this book brings the Kilkenny witchcraft case back to life, from the shadowed streets of medieval Ireland to the fire that consumed Petronilla de Meath, the servant who paid the heaviest price when Alice herself escaped.