Technical Difficulties

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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Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England by Elizabeth Reis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I hate starting a review with "this book was meh," but . . . this book was meh.

Reis' thesis is that in seventeenth-century Puritan New England, when everyone was obsessed with scrutinizing their souls for signs of damnation or salvation, and when a central event in a person's life was likely to be their conversion testimony (you stand up in front of the church you want to join and tell the church members how you came to realize that (a) you were a sinful crawling worm and (b) God had chosen you to be among the Elect regardless), while men tended to say that their sinful actions corrupted their souls, women were much more likely to say that their corrupted souls led them to sinful actions. She talks about how this led (or might have led) to women's confessions of witchcraft--if you view sin as a continuum, and if your corrupted soul means you cannot deny that you are sinful at heart, then how can you be certain that you aren't a witch?

Reis proves her thesis, and it's a subject I'm quite interested in, but the book itself just . . . meh. It was a book. I read it. If you're researching the subject either of Puritan witchcraft or the experience of Puritan women, it's definitely worth reading. Otherwise, not so much.



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Briggs, Robin. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchhunts. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 1996.

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For most of this book, I was planning to blog about it and say basically, "This is a pretty good book." And then I hit the last chapter and the evolutionary psychology and no. He lost all the good will he'd built up and I started yelling.

LEAVING THAT ASIDE, this is a pretty good book. It is interesting and helpful because it is a comparison of witchhunts in various countries, and since I don't know very much about European witchhunts except what "everybody knows," I found the material fascinating. And he pointed out something about why Salem is so weird that I knew, but hadn't ever really noticed, which is that only in the Salem witch trials would confessing save your life. In Salem, if you confessed to being a witch, your life would be spared. Those who were hanged were uniformly those who refused to confess. But in other places and times, unless you got incredibly unlucky, if you could withstand a round or two of torture and still profess your innocence, you were likely to be released. Those who confessed were burned. It's an incredibly important point--and like I said, it's something I knew--and one thing Briggs does very well is foregrounding the backwardness of the Salem trials.

But Briggs is a sloppy writer; in particular (and crucially for discussions of witchcraft accusations), he is sloppy about pronouns and antecedents, so that it becomes very difficult to tell what is the accused's testimony (i.e., what they actually said) and what is the accuser's testimony about what the accused said. This is very problematic.

He also falls into a logical fallacy--and it's all over the evolutionary psychology conclusion--which goes something like this:

1. There were people genuinely practicing witchcraft, that is, cursing their neighbors in the belief that they had the power to make that curse work.

2. There were people accused of witchcraft.

ERGO, the people accused of witchcraft were practicing witchcraft, and were therefore actually a threat to their accusers.

He's very insistent about citing the studies about present day cultures in which witchcraft is still a powerful belief, the studies we've all heard about where it's shown that if a witch curses someone who believes in the witch's power, the victim will, in fact, die. (He ignores some pretty crucial differences between those cultures and the culture he's studying.) And there's a lot of handwavy elision around the evidence that some accused witches did utter curses and threats against the people who would go on to accuse them, and things get all turned around until the people making accusations of witchcraft are actually right to do so. (This is largely where the evolutionary psychology comes in.)

And that is so completely wrong that it makes me yell at the book. There are so many victims of the witchhunts that, yes, the laws of probability say that some of them did practice maleficium and did believe that they were witches. But it is abundantly evident, over and over again, that the vast majority of people accused of being witches were no such thing. They were generally misfits, not outsiders so much as people who just didn't quite fit with their neighbors, who were quarrelsome or pushy or just inconvenient. They did not deserve what happened to them, and I'm actually kind of furious at Briggs for twisting things around to suggest that they did.

Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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There are two problems that I complain about persistently when I'm blogging about the Salem Witchcraft Crisis. One is the tendency of Salem historians to go around proclaiming that they have found the One! True! Cause! The other is the failure of modern historians to cope with witchcraft beliefs.

( how Godbeer stacks up )

As with Escaping Salem, the other book of Godbeer's that I've read, The Devil's Dominion is competent to very good research-wise: he's read a lot more Puritan divines than I could ever bear to, that's for sure, and he did an excellent job of laying out primary evidence for the schism between the legal definition of witchcraft (a covenant with the Devil) and the popular definition of witchcraft (maleficium: doing harm to others by occult means), and I only wish he'd done a better job of talking about why that schism persisted and its causal relationship to the history of witchcraft proceedings. Analytically, the book ranges from plebeian to reductive to what I would call out and out wrong.

So, interesting but frustrating. As so many books on the subject seem to be.

Davidson, James West. The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

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This is another book that I bought mostly because it was there that turned out to be excellent. James West Davidson is a careful and respectful--but not at all reverent--scholar of the eschatology of eighteenth-century New Englanders, and he pursues his exploration mindfully, discussing overtly and straightforwardly the differences between what modern readers expect of the eighteenth century Puritans and what they get, and the problems inherent in trying to make sense of a mindset that we no longer share or even fully understand. He also has a dry, snarky sense of humor that I enjoyed immensely (certainly the last thing I expected when I started this book was to be giggling over it); in particular, I appreciate the fact that he does not take Cotton Mather at that gentleman's own self-valuation: "Mather often had a sneaking suspicion (and sometimes not so sneaking) that God might be using him as a principal instrument in fulfilling the Revelation" (13).

As someone who has written a dissertation (this book began as Davidson's doctoral thesis), I appreciate the meta-level at which Davidson periodically assesses his progress: "The argument thus far has led to two not very helpful conclusions: first, biblical prophecies seemed important to many eighteenth-century New Englanders; and second, prophecies and expositions of them are strange to us" (37). This is one of the most transparent academic books I have ever read, and I really liked the way that transparency allowed the reader a sense of the work being done by the author: we're watching Davidson construct and test and then reconstruct his theories.

The thing that this book makes me very aware of, vis-a-vis the Salem witchcraft crisis, is that no one whom I have yet read on Salem has been a historian of ideas, and I'm beginning to think a historian of ideas is what the conversation needs. No one--again, whom I have read--has made any concerted effort to get inside Puritan witchcraft beliefs in the way that Davidson is working to get inside Puritan eschatology, and I think that failure is one reason that so many of these arguments have one leg that just won't support them. Because that aspect of the witchcraft crisis needs just as much rigor of examination as all the other aspects, and it isn't getting it.

Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

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I was hoping to be able to make a post about how much better this book was than The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, and for about half the book, that was looking really likely. The first half of this book, in which Breslaw traces Tituba's probable early life, is quite good. She explains very clearly the speculative leap she's making in assuming that the slave Tattuba listed in the inventory of a Barbados plantaion is the same as the slave Tituba Samuel Parris brought to Salem Village, and she not only convinced me that the leap was justified, she demonstrated that even if Tituba and Tattuba were not the same person, the reconstruction Breslaw managed of Tattuba's life was still worthwhile, in that it illuminated a great deal about what Tituba's experiences would have been like.

Then we hit 1692, and the thing just fell apart. Breslaw has the Salem historian's disease, in which the one cause on which the historian has focused is proclaimed to be the ONLY cause. In Breslaw's case, she asserts that the reason the Salem witchcraft crisis exploded in the way it did, mushrooming to nineteen executions and well over one hundred arrests, the only important reason is Tituba's testimony. Even without the other problems (which I'll get to in a moment), I would disagree with this thesis; I think the crucial moment is when the adult authority figures asked the afflicted girls who had bewitched them and accepted their answers as unquestionable truth. I also think that moment has a tremendously complicated genesis of its own, as well as very complicated consequences. And I would certainly agree that Tituba's testimony encouraged the spread of suspicion. But she didn't cause it, and she certainly didn't create the ground-breaking paradigm of social upheaval that Breslaw claims.

So I disagree with the argument. But I also find that the argument is very shoddily put together. She talks a great deal about the impact of the story Tituba told, the importance of the words she used, and the ways in which her testimony was repeated, embroidered, and modified by the afflicted girls and the confessing witches, but she uses almost no direct quotes. It's all described in indirect discourse. The generalizations are breathtaking in their sweep, particularly in discussing the culture of "American Indians." She makes no effort to distinguish between the Arawak Indians of South America (Tituba's probable tribe)--whose folklore and beliefs she claims influenced Tituba's testimony--and the Indians of north-eastern North America (unlike with the Arawak, she never specifies which tribes are under discussion) whom the European settlers were intermittently at war with throughout the second half of the seventeenth century--whose folklore and beliefs she claims influenced the magistrates' reception of Tituba's testimony; I find it hard to believe that "American Indians" in her argument are anything more than a locum tenens for ... well, for something that Breslaw hasn't done enough work on.

And Breslaw is particularly inconsistent on the historians' bugbear I have complained about before: the nature of the participants' belief in witchcraft. She assumes that the nightmares Tituba describes in her testimony are real, and that she made the witchcake in a sincere effort to help Betty Parris. But she also assumes that Tituba deliberately and consciously tailored her testimony to give the magistrates what they wanted to hear, and that she equally deliberately constructed it as a subversive and subtle attack on her master, Samuel Parris. She also insists on describing it is a "model for resistance" (180). And when she talks about the confessing witches using Tituba's testimony, it is always as if they were in conscious control of a sophisticated strategy of resistance. I will give one example:

Tituba's unidentified evil presence, the imputations of elite responsibility, a witches' meeting, and assorted strange creatures provided a forum for the exposure of discontent with Puritan theology and ministerial intellectual demands; with the social class system and degradation of servants; and above all with the traditions of the late medieval world that valued communal goals above individual efforts. Tituba may have omitted sexual references because Indian cultures never made the erotic side of human behavior a factor in witchcraft prceedings. Others followed her lead for different reasons--sexual exploits might have negated their intent to parody Puritan values by conflating the godly and demonic realms. In this technique, as in others, Tituba again had supplied the outlines of a method that could be embellished and reformulated to fit the mental baggage of other cultures.
(Breslaw 155)

She assumes "resistance" to be behind all the confessions (though, oddly, she doesn't spend much time applying the idea to the afflicted girls, where I think it can be more plausibly deployed--although still with much more caution than Breslaw shows), without ever acknowledging that as a method of resistance, confessing to witchcraft is a dismal failure, and without doing any of the work necessary to show how her modern, theoretical concept of "resistance" actually applies to the lives and words of her subjects. And she consistently makes assertions about Tituba's motivations that she does not prove--and couldn't prove if she tried. Unlike with the identification of Tituba and Tattuba in the first half of the book, these speculative assertions are not defensible either historiographically or rhetorically. Like Srebnick, Breslaw overstates the importance of her central figure, and like Srebnick, rather than supporting her grandiose argument with evidence and careful reasoning, she supports it with buzzwords and academic obfuscation.

What really irks me about this book is that it could have been so much better. Not just in the general sense in which a poorly written book can always be a better book, but quite specifically. Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare (which I posted about here) has some excellent and provocative work on a subject one could encapsulate by Breslaw's subtitle: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies; Norton's work makes clear that the Puritan construction of Indians, particularly in relation to the Devil, probably did have a profound influence on the Salem crisis, and that is a topic that I think could and should be written about more--and should include Tituba. But Breslaw, while she mentions various facets of Puritan beliefs about Indians, doesn't examine them carefully, or make any sustained or persuasive effort to show, at the nuts and bolts level, how those beliefs influenced what happened at Salem.

So half of this is a good book and half of it is a mess. Unfortunately, the good half, while good, isn't great, and the mess is really kind of awful. Unless you're a Salem-completist like me, I can't recommend this one.

Since it has occurred to me that somebody out there may be curious, below is an extremely incomplete list of the nonfiction books I'm currently looking for.

Caveat: Except in exceptional circumstances--such as a gift card--I don't buy books online. When I tell you that the complete (though of course infinitely expanding) list of books I'm looking for--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama--is 17 pages, 10-point and single spaced, you will perhaps understand that this is an act of mercy upon my bank balance. So please, don't tell me where I can find these books from an online seller. You will only make the baby trellwolves cry.

On the other hand, if you want to recommend other books on these subjects, please feel free!

[ETA: Caveat 2: I'm not actually looking for help in finding these books. I know about libraries and interlibrary loan and all other such marvels. The reason my book posts are always headed UBC (Unread Book Challenge) is because I have MOUNTAINS of unread books in my house--although this doesn't stop me cheerfully going off and buying more books in used bookstores (I almost never buy books new anymore, unless they're written by friends). I get a profound and abiding satisfaction out of trolling used bookstores, a satisfaction which I don't think I can explain. If for some reason I needed one of these books urgently, I would certainly turn to the university libraries. As it is, this list is all about the hunt--and the thrill I get when I capture one of these books in the wild. *ahem* I just realized that my patron saint here is Professor Wormbog. Tra la la lally.]

( cut to spare the world )

There are dozens more, but I'm giving myself a headache, so I think it's time to stop.

Godbeer, Richard. Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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This is a fairly straightforward recounting of the events of 1692 in Stamford, Connecticut, where a seventeen-year-old servant named Katherine Branch started having fits in April (too early, in other words, for her to be influenced by reports of the goings-on in Salem). Godbeer chronicles her master and mistress' attempts to find an explanation, either natural or supernatural, and the eventual uneasy settling on witchcraft; the (comparatively) slow process by which Kate came to accuse Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough as her tormentors; and Goodwives Clawson and Disborough's trial and eventual acquittal. It's all very familiar if you've read much of anything about witchcraft in colonial New England--and probably a good place to start if you haven't. The most interesting chapter is the examination of the magistrate William Jones' notes on the legal requirements for a conviction. Unfortunately, the least successful chapter is the last one, where Godbeer steps back from his narrative to provide historical contexts and some very rudimentary analysis. Most of his best points are simplified from other authors (particularly John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan, and Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare*), and he doesn't do anything with them. Also, although he does some comparisons with Salem, he doesn't discuss the points I thought were the most interesting:

1. Kate Branch's affliction was not contagious, unlike the very similar fits of the girls in Salem. No other persons joined her in her suffering--and this despite the fact that Joanna Wescot, the daughter of Kate's employers, had suffered fits of the same sort a few years previously.

2. The magistrates in Connecticut seem to have been following very different rules than the ones in Massachusetts, including the a priori disallowal of spectral evidence (i.e., anything an afflicted person claimed to have seen or heard in one of her fits); the insistence that there be two reliable witnesses for any piece of evidence; and the clear focus on the covenant with the Devil as the prosecutable offense, not the sufferings that the accused might or might not be inflicting on her neighbors. Books about Salem spend a lot of time, of course, talking about the controversy over spectral evidence (although Godbeer makes it sound as if there was no controversy, that the legal situation was unambiguous--which my other reading has suggested was not the case), but the other two points--also the point that judicial torture was illegal under English (and therefore colonial) law, which means (a.) most of the confessions in the Salem trials were invalid and (b.) the actual criminals were the authorities--are things I haven't seen discussed before. I would really have liked a little more unpacking of this particular issue.

3. The attitude shown by the magistrates toward the afflicted parties were polar reversals of each other. Whereas the afflicted girls in Salem were considered to be unimpeachable witnesses and were all but encouraged to "perform" at the trials of those they accused, Kate Branch was treated with extreme skepticism. If she was present at the examinations of Goodwife Disborough and Goodwife Clawson, either she did not fall into fits or the magistrates disregarded her fits as evidence. Partly, of course, they were determined not to follow Salem's terrible example, but I would have liked Godbeer to have discussed in greater depth the process by which, in Stamford, the focus shifted away from Kate Branch once the legal proceedings began.

In general, this book is quite useful for throwing a spotlight on the moments at and ways in which Salem fell off the beam and into what can be quite accurately called hysteria. Ironically--given its title and Godbeer's stated aim of correcting our view of witchcraft trials in colonial New England--I found that this, being a single case study and without any ground-breaking analysis, didn't tell me anything new about the general subject of witchcraft in New England, but it DID highlight peculiarities of the situation in Salem and suggested new questions to ask.

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*01/29/2011: Having now read Godbeer's earlier book, The Devil's Dominion (1992), I need to modify that a little: he made the points about the hostility with Native Americans before Norton.

This may become a Continuing Series, as I am, in fact, still sick. However.

Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.

( cut tag behind which there is a slight rant )

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And now, just to give you whiplash:

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.

This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.

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Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.

Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.

That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.

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Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.

This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.

His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.

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Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.

This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.

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Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.

This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.