Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) was an American author, journalist, humorist, folklorist, translator, and collector of popular traditions. Born in Philadelphia, he studied in the United States and Europe, worked in journalism, and wrote widely on folklore, language, Romani culture, folk magic, and popular belief. His interests ranged across marginal, oral, and esoteric traditions that many nineteenth-century scholars either ignored or treated only as curiosities.Leland is now best remembered for Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, first published in 1899. The book was based on material he said had been supplied by an Italian woman he called Maddalena, who assisted him in collecting regional folklore and witchcraft traditions. Leland believed the material preserved elements of a surviving Italian witch religion centred on Diana and Aradia. Later historians and folklorists have disputed the extent and nature of that claim, but the book's influence is beyond dispute. It became one of the key texts through which twentieth-century readers imagined witchcraft as a goddess-centred, anti-authoritarian, pagan survival.Beyond Aradia, Leland's works include Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, The English Gipsies and Their Language, and many other books concerned with folklore, magic, language, and vernacular culture. His legacy rests on both the fascination and the difficulty of his work: he preserved unusual material, interpreted it boldly, and left later readers with texts that remain central to the study of occultism, folklore, modern Paganism, and the reinvention of witchcraft in the modern world.