The surprising parallels between 17th-century witch hunts and today

Lucianne Tonti was researching her first book, Sundressed, about sustainable fashion when she visited Fibershed, a regenerative farming outfit in California.

"[It] is basically ground zero for regenerative fibre farming," Tonti tells ABC Arts.

"When you're farming regeneratively, you're bringing back biodiversity [with] no synthetic inputs, improving water cycles, ecosystem functionality, soil health … Theoretically, [you can create fashion] with a negative carbon footprint, so that's actually pulling carbon out of the atmosphere."

Behind the house, Tonti spied a meadow of dye plants like indigo and marigold. In the dye shed, she found copper cauldrons, benches laden with glass vials of powder and bunches of dried herbs and flowers strung along the roof.

Outside, by a stream, a collection of stools was arranged under the branches of a large tree; a weaving circle, according to the guide.

"[It] looked to me like somewhere you would cast a spell," Tonti says.

After the trip, Tonti discovered a large body of academic work examining the overlap of "the iconography of women's work — so the cauldron, the broom, the spindle — and the iconography of the witch", she says.

"Once I started to pull at that thread, it took me all the way back to the witch hunts between the 15th and the 18th centuries, the 300 years leading up to industrialisation."

Crucially, this period immediately preceded the introduction of capitalism, a system which, to the frustration of sustainable fashion advocates today, has come to rely on the exploitation of women's labour and the environment.

"What I realised was that both of those things have roots in the witch hunts," says Tonti, who explores these connections in her new book, Good Witch: In Search of Our Lost Feminine Power.

Good Witch is divided into five parts: Gardener, Gossip, Spinster, Healer and Nymph; "all feminine archetypes but also all tied to women's work", Tonti explains.

Each section tells the story of one or more witch trials, often disturbing accounts of accusation, torture, interrogation and death through the lens of different aspects of women's everyday lives.

Tonti's research took her to far-flung locations: the remote Norwegian coast, woods in the English countryside and the exurbs of New England in the US, exposing deep-seated misogyny through the centuries.

The witch hunts of the early modern period coincided with significant social change triggered in part by the scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries.