{"id":9327,"date":"2018-04-24T19:36:26","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T01:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9327"},"modified":"2018-05-08T16:52:06","modified_gmt":"2018-05-08T22:52:06","slug":"enchanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9327","title":{"rendered":"The Best New Book about the Salem Witch Trials"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Wouldn’t you like to live in an enchanted world, where everything in nature brought messages from gods and spirits?<\/p>\n

The New England Puritans<\/a> did so, but with a smaller cast of characters: their God and their Devil.<\/p>\n

But there were lots of messages all the same:<\/p>\n

If your cow died, if lightning struck your house, if your nine-year-old niece arched her back and babbled hysterically, complaining of “bites and pinches by ‘invisible agents,'” it meant something<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Either God was testing you or the Devil was trying to topple the pious colony of New England. To quote the Puritan clergyman and prolific author Cotton Mather, “I am a man greatly assaulted by Satan. Is it because I have done so much against that enemy?”<\/p>\n

The quotes are from Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I had read her biography Cleopatra: A Life<\/em> earlier and was impressed. When I saw that she had tackled the Salem witch trials, I knew that I had a good read ahead of me.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Books on Salem history at the Athenaeum.<\/p><\/div>\n

I wonder if more books have been written about the 1692 Salem witch trials than any other, starting within weeks of the final executions and continuing up until today. These are some of the Salem-history books at the Salem Athenaeum (a private library) \u2014 the top shelf is all witch-trial books, and I can think of some that are missing or were checked out.<\/p>\n

If you are going to read just one book though, make it Stacy Schiff’s. It is grounded in research, but it reads like a novel, while performing the historian’s essential task, which is to show you that no one explanation covers what happened that year in today’s Salem<\/a>, Danvers<\/a>, and Andover<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nearly as many theories have been advanced to explain the Salem witch trials as the Kennedy assassination. Our first true crime story has been attributed to generational, sexual, economic, ecclesiastical, and class tensions; regional hostilities imported from England, food poisoning, a hothouse religion in a cold climate; teenage hysteria, fraud, taxes, conspiracy, political instability, trauma induced by Indian attacks, and to witchcraft itself, among the more reasonable theories. . . . .The irresistible locked-room mystery of the matter is what keeps us coming back to it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unlike some accounts, Schiff’s continues past the end of the trials themselves, noting how the end of the witchcraft panic, though it diminished the social position of the Puritan church, did not change the theology about the Devil and witchcraft. The Devil was still out there. New England remained “enchanted,” at least in the sociological sense.<\/p>\n

The year 1692 disappeared from some official chronicles as well as important individuals’ journals, which makes historians’ job harder. One thing we can say: it damaged but did not break the prestige of the Puritan clergy, who had thought of themselves, in effect, as the rulers of the people \u2014 only to see George Burroughs, a former Salem village minister<\/a>, sent to the hanging tree himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wouldn’t you like to live in an enchanted world, where everything in nature brought messages from gods and spirits? The New England Puritans did so, but with a smaller cast of characters: their God and their Devil. But there were lots of messages all the same: If your cow died, if lightning struck your house, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,24,100,325,29],"class_list":["post-9327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-christianity","tag-history","tag-salem","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2qr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9408,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9408","url_meta":{"origin":9327,"position":0},"title":"Hawthorne’s Witches and a Secret History of Salem","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 28, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"A century and a half after the Salem witch trials, they still lived in the mind of a young Salem writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804\u20131864). From his fiancee's window, if he had a good arm, he could have thrown an ink bottle at the headstone of his ancestor John Hathorne, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"literature\"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/hawthornes-girlfriend.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9245,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9245","url_meta":{"origin":9327,"position":1},"title":"Our Salem Film Festival","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 8, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Prompted by J. W. Ocker's A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts, M. and I held a little Salem film festival. (We skipped The Lords of Salem.) In order of creation, we watched these three movies:\u00a0 Three Sovereigns for Sarah (1985), Hocus Pocus\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9439,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9439","url_meta":{"origin":9327,"position":2},"title":"Salem, Arkham, and H. P. Lovecraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 1, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"What Bourbon Street is to New Orleans' French Quarter, Essex Street is to Salem, Mass. When it's party time (October), this is where the party happens. Otherwise, it is the chief tourist-commercial street, whether you want the Peabody Essex Museum, Christian Day's witch shop,\u00a0or The Witch House, which was actually\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Massachusetts\"","block_context":{"text":"Massachusetts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=massachusetts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/essex-st-west-vertical.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9653,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9653","url_meta":{"origin":9327,"position":3},"title":"Not Everyone in Salem was a Puritan","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 8, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Just a post-postscript to my earlier series of posts about witchcraft and Salem, Mass. We tend to phrase the story of the 1690s as Puritans hunting \"witches,\" and it is true that members of the Puritan churches set the moral tone in most of New England. But they were not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/England-Scottish-soldiers.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9206,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9206","url_meta":{"origin":9327,"position":4},"title":"Witches, Sea Captains, and Art \u2014\u00a0We Go Back to Salem","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Last November, during the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Boston, I made a quick trip to Salem, Mass., with some fellow Pagan studies scholars. It was only one afternoon\u2014long enough to visit some of the witchy shops, a magickal temple, the Charter Street\u00a0cemetery, and a few other sites.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/black-magic-rum-ocker-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9376,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9376","url_meta":{"origin":9327,"position":5},"title":"Where Were the Witches Hanged in Salem? (Part 1)","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 26, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I left our Salem apartment last Thursday to walk to the site, but what people used to think was the site is not the site. In fact, the true location, which was of course known at the time and remembered through at least the mid-18th century, when the last persons\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"Gallows Hill municipal water tank, Salem, Massachusetts","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Gallows-hill-water-tank-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Gallows-hill-water-tank-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Gallows-hill-water-tank-sm.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9327"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9510,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327\/revisions\/9510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}