Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word witchcraft comes from the Old English compound wiccecræft, formed from wicce (witch) and cræft (craft), and is more than a thousand years old. The masculine form was wicca. The Oxford English Dictionary traces wicce and wicca to the Old English verb wiccian, meaning to practice witchcraft, which has a cognate in Middle Low German wicken, attested from the 13th century.
Tens of thousands of people were executed across Europe during the early modern period of witch trials. Scotland was especially severe, with between 4,000 and 6,000 prosecutions from the 16th century through the mid-18th century, a rate far higher than the European average.
The Malleus Maleficarum, meaning Hammer of the Witches, was a witch-hunting manual written in 1486 by German monk-inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. It was the most sold book in Europe for more than a hundred years after the Christian Bible, and served as a handbook for secular courts across Europe, used by both Catholics and Protestants.
A 2022 study found that belief in witchcraft as malevolent magic varies from 9% of people in some countries to 90% in others. Stronger belief correlated with lower economic development, weaker institutions, lower education levels, lower life expectancy, and high religiosity. Modern witch-hunting, scapegoating, and the murder of suspected witches still occurs in parts of Africa and Asia.
Cunning folk were practitioners of helpful or white magic in Britain and parts of Europe, offering services such as breaking spells, healing, finding stolen goods, and love magic. They were generally distinguished from witches, who practiced maleficium or harmful magic, and were dealt with more leniently by courts. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of 1532 and the Danish Witchcraft Act of 1617 both stated that workers of folk magic should be treated differently from witches.
Wicca is a modern neopagan religion pioneered by Gerald Gardner that emerged in Europe in the 20th century. It drew inspiration from ceremonial magic, historical paganism, and Margaret Murray's witch-cult hypothesis, which proposed that those persecuted as witches in early modern Europe were followers of a surviving pagan religion. Murray's hypothesis has since been discredited by historical research, but Wicca grew into the largest religious movement to emerge from 20th-century occult neopaganism.