truepenny | Review: Boynton, Connecticut Witch Trials (2014)

Connecticut Witch Trials: The First Panic in the New World by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a couple of books with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about Connecticut's witch trials being unfairly overshadowed by Salem. Granted, it's hard to look away from Salem, but part of the reason for this, as I think Cynthia Wolfe Boynton had to grapple with in writing this book, is that we know so much more about Salem's witches than we do about Connecticut's witches, and there are, of course, more of them. So this is a very skinny book and it's clearly taking up room with whatever it can, including Durer engravings and illustrations from nineteenth century works about, ironically, Salem. It needed a better copy-editor (someone who would catch the use of "ancestors" when what was meant was "descendants" and, my favorite typo, The Witch of Blackboard Pond). The prose is good, but the book is not very well organized, which I think again has something to do with the skimpiness of the material. Not all of its sources are reliable---or even worth quoting (the imaginative description of an imaginary witchcraft trial from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1881 that makes the glaring error of having the female suspect searched for witch's teats by MEN, like, why is this even HERE?).

Two and a half stars, round up to three.

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