Review: Roach, The Salem Witch Trials (2002)

[truepenny]

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege by Marilynne K. Roach

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a monumental work, both in that it is more than 600 pages long, counting appendices and in that, as the author says, it took her twenty-plus years. It's a day by day recounting of the Salem Village witchcraft crisis, correlated with things happening in surrounding villages, in Salem Town, in Boston (especially in the households of Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell, since those gentlemen obligingly left records), on the Maine frontier, in England. She starts with an overview of Salem Village history from 1661 to 1691, then begins her exhaustive timeline in January 1692 and ends it with Samuel Sewell's apology in 1697, though she continues, in her epilogue, to note the aftereffects of the trials all the way to 2001, when the last of the accused were finally legally cleared of the charge of witchcraft. Her appendices list the accused, the afflicted, the accusers, those who signed petitions, and the membership of the Salem Village church. I longed for genealogical charts, but they would have required a supplementary volume to themselves, and she does note when two people are sisters or in-laws or otherwise related, revealing a web of interconnections and inter-relations that has not been apparent in any other book on Salem that I have read, even Boyer and Nussbaum's Salem Possessed, which is all about how the tensions between two Salem families were instrumental in causing the crisis. (She also, by noting the deaths of the Mather and Sewell children---and Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell's reactions---makes very immediate and personal the horrible infant mortality rate in colonial New England, and really puts paid to the stereotype that the Puritans did not love their children.)

She does not speculate as to causes and motivations, merely notes the evidence as presented in the testimony of witnesses, both those who testified to the reality of the afflicted persons' sufferings and those who caught them in instances of fraud. She sorts out very patiently who said what and when they said it, and clarifies, for instance, that Cotton Mather never attended any of the witchcraft trials (only one hanging) and thus wrote his apologia on the simple assumption, not that spectral evidence was valid, but that if the judges---being intelligent and learned men---convicted a person, they must have done so for good reasons.

This is well-written, thoughtful, careful, extremely readable, even though it sounds like it wouldn't be. Highly recommended.



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