The Penguin Book of Witches Read Online Free

presentist interpretations. These various readings of the Salem episode are attractive primarily because they are easily dismissed: Satan made dangerous inroads once but not again; the Middle Ages are well behind us; and bread mold is easily controlled. None of these proximate causes suggest that Salem was a usual or predictable phenomenon and they all reinforce the comforting thought that such a widespread government-sanctioned panic cannot possibly happen again.
    Recent scholarship presents a more nuanced and resilient interpretive picture. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum argue in their 1974 book,
Salem Possessed
, that the largest and most fatal North American witch crisis can be understood as a land-based rivalry between two loose family groups, the Porters and the Putnams. Within this rivalry reside kernels of class resentment, coalescing around the divisive figure of the village minister, Samuel Parris, and the cultural differences between a growing port town (Salem Town) and its more insular rural counterpart (Salem Village). The Boyer and Nissenbaum argument represents a starting point for an understanding of what went awry in Salem Village, though its narrow focus requires greater elaboration.
    That elaboration begins to appear in 1987’s
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
by Carol Karlsen. Part of the broader trend toward cultural history and its attendant emphasis on questions of class and gender, Karlsen’s writing focuses on an all-important question that had preoccupied writers on witchcraft during the early modern period, but which had eluded Boyer and Nissenbaum: namely, what to make of the fact that most witches were women. In Karlsen’s view, female witches tended to be middle-aged women who were socially conspicuous in some way and challenged the rigid gender hierarchy of Puritan New England. Karlsen’s point is a vital one for an understanding of Salem but still leaves questions unanswered. Why this particular community? Why then?
    Answers to this last set of questions take shape in Mary Beth Norton’s 2003 account,
In the Devil’s Snare
. Norton rightly points out that the Salem witch crisis might be better understood as the Essex County witch crisis, as its complex web of accusations and suspected witches extended well outside of Salem Village and deep into the surrounding countryside. She broadens the focus beyond the intricacies of village life, instead placing the Salem episode in context with the Indian wars across the Maine frontier. Norton demonstrates that many of the afflicted girls had direct ties to the violence at the Eastward, and that the language that is used to describe the Devil during the trial testimony overlaps with the language used to describe the native population. The Salem Villagers were a “People of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories,”
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and the strain, at the personal, political, and psychological levels, on a community so deeply touched with violence and uncertainty, could only find its expression in that culture, at that time, in a witch trial.
    Seen within the wider context of English witch-hunting with other North American examples, the Salem witch crisis can no longer be explained away as an anomaly. Every aspect of the Salem crisis—the region in which it took place, the personalities that emerge from the historical record, the outcomes for the accused and the accusers, even the scale of the trial—had an antecedent that can clearly be identified and that was sometimes even known to the participants themselves. Salem’s unique element was the expressed idea of a covenanted conspiracy of witches, a parallel anti-Christian community within the visible Christian one, with accounts of witches’ Sabbaths that find their roots in English folk magical belief.
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Even the concept of conspiracy, which opened the scale of inquiry to include as many as 150 people before the panic was brought to a close, finds its source in English