UBC: Salem Story
Apr. 5th, 2011 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyRosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
This book is about the historiography of Salem, specifically about the way that the mythology of Salem has gotten into the history and caused problems in terms of what we think we know a priori and thus never bother to track down and verify. Rosenthal is quite good at digging into the primary sources and the early secondary sources and pointing out where divergences happen and why. Particularly interesting is the case of Bridget Bishop, who was in fact not a tavern keeper and not noted for wearing a red Paragon bodice. Two of the afflicted girls, and many historians and researchers thereafter, got confused and conflated her with Sarah Bishop, who was both those things . . . but not accused of witchcraft. He also addresses, quite usefully, the question of why the Mathers, having been publicly skeptical about spectral evidence and the choices the judges were making, suddenly became very publicly gung-ho (particularly Cotton) when George Burroughs was condemned. Short answer: Burroughs was a Baptist, or had Baptist leanings, and as such was anathema to Increase and Cotton. I'm not sure I buy Rosenthal's argument 100%, for reasons I'll discuss in a moment, but it's a useful factor to know about.
My problem with Rosenthal is that he is so committed to demystifying Salem that he reduces it all to fraud, "hysteria" (which he doesn't define anymore than anyone ever does define it when talking about Salem), self-preservation, and greed. He proves that some of the afflicted persons (he rightly points out that many of them were not girls) must have been committing fraud--pins stuck into afflicted persons' hands are particularly damning. But he generalizes from that, notwithstanding some vague comments about hysteria, to assume that all of them must have been frauds, just as, although he says that some of the confessing witches believed in their own witchcraft, all the confessors he talks about specifically were confessing (he argues) because they had realized that if you confessed, you wouldn't be hanged. He also uses the evidence of Thomas Brattle, a particularly outspoken critic of the trials, to argue that, since one contemporary Puritan did not believe in witchcraft and thought everything about the Salem crisis was specious, all contemporary Puritans must have felt the same. He's arguing, quite passionately, against cultural relativism in the form of, "the poor dears, they didn't know any better," and while I agree with his principle, I think he's gone too far in the other direction and overstated the degree of empirical, material-based reasoning to be found among the general population of New England.
And he has the same problem other advocates of the fraud thesis have, namely that fraud provides an explanation for the physical manifestations, but it doesn't do anything to explain either the motivations of the afflicted persons nor the behavior of the judges--who, in Rosenthal's account, might as well be twirling their mustaches and laughing evil laughs.
In other words, he's very good at debunking some of the accreted misconceptions about Salem--and that's very valuable in and of itself--but he doesn't have a persuasive new history to offer.
This book is about the historiography of Salem, specifically about the way that the mythology of Salem has gotten into the history and caused problems in terms of what we think we know a priori and thus never bother to track down and verify. Rosenthal is quite good at digging into the primary sources and the early secondary sources and pointing out where divergences happen and why. Particularly interesting is the case of Bridget Bishop, who was in fact not a tavern keeper and not noted for wearing a red Paragon bodice. Two of the afflicted girls, and many historians and researchers thereafter, got confused and conflated her with Sarah Bishop, who was both those things . . . but not accused of witchcraft. He also addresses, quite usefully, the question of why the Mathers, having been publicly skeptical about spectral evidence and the choices the judges were making, suddenly became very publicly gung-ho (particularly Cotton) when George Burroughs was condemned. Short answer: Burroughs was a Baptist, or had Baptist leanings, and as such was anathema to Increase and Cotton. I'm not sure I buy Rosenthal's argument 100%, for reasons I'll discuss in a moment, but it's a useful factor to know about.
My problem with Rosenthal is that he is so committed to demystifying Salem that he reduces it all to fraud, "hysteria" (which he doesn't define anymore than anyone ever does define it when talking about Salem), self-preservation, and greed. He proves that some of the afflicted persons (he rightly points out that many of them were not girls) must have been committing fraud--pins stuck into afflicted persons' hands are particularly damning. But he generalizes from that, notwithstanding some vague comments about hysteria, to assume that all of them must have been frauds, just as, although he says that some of the confessing witches believed in their own witchcraft, all the confessors he talks about specifically were confessing (he argues) because they had realized that if you confessed, you wouldn't be hanged. He also uses the evidence of Thomas Brattle, a particularly outspoken critic of the trials, to argue that, since one contemporary Puritan did not believe in witchcraft and thought everything about the Salem crisis was specious, all contemporary Puritans must have felt the same. He's arguing, quite passionately, against cultural relativism in the form of, "the poor dears, they didn't know any better," and while I agree with his principle, I think he's gone too far in the other direction and overstated the degree of empirical, material-based reasoning to be found among the general population of New England.
And he has the same problem other advocates of the fraud thesis have, namely that fraud provides an explanation for the physical manifestations, but it doesn't do anything to explain either the motivations of the afflicted persons nor the behavior of the judges--who, in Rosenthal's account, might as well be twirling their mustaches and laughing evil laughs.
In other words, he's very good at debunking some of the accreted misconceptions about Salem--and that's very valuable in and of itself--but he doesn't have a persuasive new history to offer.
