From the second review on the thread:
These analogies are chosen with care, for Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries bears a striking similarity to fascist and fundamentalist societies in our own time. Repression and control were the watchwords of the day, in fact modern medicine, psychology, demographics and the social sciences all developed at this time in a grand effort to learn how to make people “fit” into the straitjacket of capitalist relations.
Oh, ffs. It would be far more accurate to say:
These analogies are chosen with care, for they can be exploited to create the insupportable and ludicrous illusion that Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries bears a striking similarity to fascist and fundamentalist societies in our own time for the blatantly commercial purposes of attracting a popular contemporary readership to this bogus historical account.
Which is by way of saying:
You guys wanna know something? If that book does indeed make the arguments described in the OP and the second review, it's a very shallow and overdetermined reading of history that focuses on the academically chic topic areas of gender and capitalism to the exclusion of real scholarship.
The feudal system wasn't a single, stable dominant economic model that functioned in the same way all over Europe that it did in (easiest and most obvious but not the only example) England. Pagan rites (first review) were not a culturally characteristic and widespread phenomenon among the peasant classes on a continental basis by the late middle ages. They'd survived, in whole or in part, in a quasi-syncretized form in some far-flung nooks and crannies of it. As they still do, I suppose, there and elsewhere. But there's no question that by then it was a fully post-Christian culture, definitively and decidedly, as it still is and as it had been for centuries.
And blah, blah, blah, blah.
The major huge glaring and gaping flaw in the witches-'n'-populism-led-to-capitalism-in-the-late-middle-ages hypothesis is that there's a much, much more clearly traceable and tangible line of totally straightforward economic, sociocultural and -- for lack of a better word -- "technological" advances leading to capitalism in that period. So you don't really need to look for one in the highways and hedgerows. It's right there. In plain sight. For example, that colonization-of-the-new-world thing to which the OP glancingly refers? Kind of a landmark moment in the history of global trade. Very, very instrumental in the transformation of what had been a primarily agrarian economy (which did keep the serfs down on the farm quite effectively for quite some time) into a trade-based, goods-and-services economy. With, I don't know, in no particular order: gentry, guilds, merchants, urbanization, the whole proto-industrial and proto-bourgeois nine yards. Before you knew it, literacy was breaking out here and there.
I mean, it's not that clean-cut, wrt timing. History never is. Obviously. It's not like a bell rings and suddenly it's the Renaissance. There was already something of a proto- proto-middle class by the 11th century, basically due to (again) "technological" advances that facilitated travel and communication between and among places that wouldn't have been accessible to one another prior to the rise of the town, the creation and expansion of roads, the cultural attitude adjustments wrt perceptions of what constituted "home" and "abroad" and so on and so forth. And....That's just always a very easy one to remember (where things were at in the 11th century in England) because the signposts of it are all over
The Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath is proto-proto bourgeois, for instance.
Witch-hunts were witch-hunts, same as they are now. Just like Jews were Jews, same as they are now. If the Christian era didn't require both, both would have died out a long, long time ago. Along with serfs.
Therefore, sorry to say: Those days don't have striking analogies to the modern era. The modern era has striking analogies to those days. And that's the sad but plain truth of the matter. Don't let any pointy-headed book-writer tell you any different without checking it out very carefully yourself. They make their living telling stories. Never forget it. Don't trust me, either, btw. Study history. If there's a greater repository of understanding waiting to happen anywhere on earth, I've sure never come across it. There's nothing like it. Accept no substitute.