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I read Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 not because I'm particularly interested in the Salem witch trials, but because I liked her nonfiction prose style in the Cleopatra biography she wrote well enough that I was interested in whatever subject she chose to write about.

I felt like I had a fairly reasonable grasp on the key events going in, both from reading some books as a kid and from cultural osmosis -- hysterical teens, Tituba, stressed-out Puritans, distressed accused grandmothers, "more weight!", Cotton Mather sticking his nose in every which way -- and most of the things I vaguely remembered did indeed turn out to be accurate, though I appreciated in general Schiff's strict adherence to facts rather than speculation, and careful attention to gaps in the historical record. I also appreciated the breadth of her scope, and how she places the witchcraft scare in context; she draws a detailed portrait of the pre-existing stressors and small-town politics of Salem Village (a town so rancorous that they kicked out three ministers in ten years, one of whom ended up accused of witchcraft despite living an entire state away, and nearby Actual Salem Town wrote to them multiple times in the pre-witchcraft years to be like "PLEASE STOP ASKING US TO MEDIATE YOUR ARGUMENTS, WE'RE TIRED AND WE DON'T CARE") but also of the broader context and how Massachusetts politics may have influenced the reaction to the crisis. (It is notable -- a fact I did not know -- that the witchcraft trials somehow mysteriously slowed their roll after the governor's wife was accused.)

Maybe most of all I liked how she wrote about the little we know of the aftermath -- it's horrible but fascinating to think about all the people who accused each other at the height of the crisis and then had to spend their ENTIRE LIVES running into each other awkwardly at the store.

Schiff is particularly interested in the Nurse clan, and successfully managed to get me interested in them as well; Rebecca Nurse was an apparently much-beloved seventy-something great-grandmother whose family (unlike that of most other victims) unilaterally rallied around her when she and her sisters were accused of witchcraft and immediately started a HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE GRANDMA petition. The jury originally acquitted her! The judges were like "ummm maybe rethink that," and alas, Rebecca Nurse was executed, along with her sister, Mary Esty, who wrote a very polite letter to the judges asking that they perhaps reconsider executing any more witches after her.

Unsurprisingly, the Nurse family spent the next decade Still Mad About Grandma (And Great-Aunt Mary). They collectively refused to attend church until Samuel Parris the town minister (a prosecutor in the trials and related to several accusers) publicly apologized, which he refused to do for years, and the feud went on until finally it resulted in Parris getting forced out of his position; score one for the Nurse clan. On the other hand, the next minister reorganized church seating arrangements so that they had to sit next to the other family that accused Grandma of being a witch. So it goes. I was describing this to

attractivegeekery and

genarti and they pitched me the idea of a black comedy show about small-town sniping in seventeenth-century Puritan America, in which it is only gradually revealed that the small town is Salem and the reason Ann and Mary keep getting into fights over floral arrangements on the church beautification committee is Still Because Of That Time Grandma Was Executed For Witchcraft.

All that said, I have one major complaint about the book, and that is that for all her broad scope, Schiff somehow completely avoids some topics that I think are really quite relevant, like, for example, slavery in Puritan America. We spend a little time on Tituba; it's impossible, in writing a book on the Salem witch trials, not to spend a little time on Tituba; I still have no idea how common or uncommon it was for a man like Samuel Parris to have slaves, what their position and status would have been in Salem, and what context they themselves might bring to the witch trials. Similarly, Schiff spends a fair amount of time on the fact that the colonists lived in fear of attacks from the local tribes, and no time at all using her undeniably clever prose to contextualize or complicate Puritan Ideas about Indians.

We do, however, get some perspectives from the local Quakers. They appear to have spent the entire time period of the Salem Witch Trials filled with a deep sense of schadenfreude, and I think anyone who read The Witch of Blackbird Pond would agree that honestly that seems fair.

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Given that the Puritans had executed Quakers such as Mary Dyer for heresy, yeah, I'd say the schadenfreude seems fair.

I need to pick this one up! It's a pity that she doesn't contextualize the things you mention, but it sounds quite good apart from those areas.

The Witches: Salem, 1692

I am obligated to leave this poem here because of Nicholas Noyes, which is nuts.

Maybe most of all I liked how she wrote about the little we know of the aftermath -- it's horrible but fascinating to think about all the people who accused each other at the height of the crisis and then had to spend their ENTIRE LIVES running into each other awkwardly at the store.

I've never seen anyone write about that before. It sounds horrible but fascinating. I will steal

spatch's copy of this book.

I was describing this to attractivegeekery and genarti and they pitched me the idea of a black comedy show about small-town sniping in seventeenth-century Puritan America, in which it is only gradually revealed that the small town is Salem and the reason Ann and Mary keep getting into fights over floral arrangements on the church beautification committee is Still Because Of That Time Grandma Was Executed For Witchcraft.

YES, GOOD.

Thank you for these facts!

I. I would watch the hell out of that black comedy show.

I would definitely watch that black comedy show, or at least the first few episodes. They'd have to have the reveal by the pilot climax to really keep my attention.

Honestly, I think a lot of histories stop at the end of the obvious action because the long-term effects are just so nebulous, long reaching, and poorly documented. Did you know there was a post-Civil War opium crisis and booming addiction cure industry? I didn't until fairly recently, because it's not something you ever really hear about. We hear war ended, slaves free, Lincoln dead, not f-ed up vets with PTSD and addiction.

God, now I wonder how many people in Salem who watched Grandma hang and lived in fear that they might be called out next had PTSD as well. Maybe they weren't just pissed off with Grandma's accusers; they were triggered by them. Well, there's a thought that will be in my head all day.

/promptly places requests at the library for Schiff's work

in which it is only gradually revealed that the small town is Salem and the reason Ann and Mary keep getting into fights over floral arrangements on the church beautification committee is Still Because Of That Time Grandma Was Executed For Witchcraft.
Ooooh, that would be some high quality black comedy right there! And it's so true that often what comes after the huge culture-altering event is fascinating in itself, which is a shame because in school it felt like they taught us about history as a list of discrete momentous events.

In the years after the trials, a lot of family members and relations left Salem Village to settle on land in Danforth Plantation, owned by Thomas Danforth, around what is now Framingham and Ashland. There are rocks still called the Witch Caves and some of their houses still stand (the Esty place burned down not long ago, sadly). The road through the plantation along which the Esty family settled is called Salem End.

they pitched me the idea of a black comedy show about small-town sniping in seventeenth-century Puritan America, in which it is only gradually revealed that the small town is Salem and the reason Ann and Mary keep getting into fights over floral arrangements on the church beautification committee is Still Because Of That Time Grandma Was Executed For Witchcraft.

I would watch the hell out of this. It sounds absolutely delightful in a horrifying, horrifying way. Are Puritans allowed to have floral arrangements in church? That sounds like the kind of thing Puritans might think was too Papist. Maybe one of them wants floral arrangements and the other is on Team Floral Arrangements Are Papist and So Was Your Grandma and Team Yay Floral Arrangements is like YOU ALREADY HAD GRANDMA EXECUTED FOR WITCHCRAFT AND NOW YOU'RE COMING BACK WITH AN ACCUSATION THAT IS *EVEN WORSE* HOW DARE.

it's horrible but fascinating to think about all the people who accused each other at the height of the crisis and then had to spend their ENTIRE LIVES running into each other awkwardly at the store.

Ooh, how have I never thought about this before?!

I've actually had this book on my shelf for a few years now but haven't managed to get to it yet. Hopefully I will soon.

I have had this sitting on my shelf for about two years now but instead of reading it I listened to the entire first season of the podcast Unobscured, which I was surprised to find was largely about the war raging in New Hampshire that I had never heard of! I think Schiff was interviewed in it a few times. But it sounds like there is even more wacky stuff that got left out of the popular understanding of the witch trials than was even covered in the podcast, so probably I should dig the book up off my shelf one of these days.

(Sorry for the late comment!)

I also really enjoyed this book when I read it a few years ago, but your point that Schiff could have included more information on the background of slavery in New England is very good. I've been doing a lot of research on the history of slavery in New York City recently, and they had their own panic in 1741, over a supposed slave rebellion/conspiracy. Though there were a few cases of possible arson, historians now seem in general agreement that there wasn't any actual overarching conspiracy any more than there were literal witches in Salem. Despite that, probably around 1/4 of all the adult black men in NYC at the time ended up arrested, and around 30 people were executed (around half burned at the stake, like the pop culture image of Salem's witches!).

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to mention this is because one the main causes bringing NYC's panic to an end is a letter that a surviving witness of the Salem trials wrote to NY's surveyor-general, saying basically "you guys are doing the exact same thing we did fifty years ago, stop it", and when the surveyor-general ignored it, the letter was reprinted in full in a NYC newspaper. More of how the aftermath lived on!

Maybe most of all I liked how she wrote about the little we know of the aftermath -- it's horrible but fascinating to think about all the people who accused each other at the height of the crisis and then had to spend their ENTIRE LIVES running into each other awkwardly at the store.

Holy shit. I've never thought about that either! (Tbf, the Salem trials are obviously less of a big deal here in the UK than across the pond.) I'd watch the fuck out of that TV series, too - like a very dark Vicar of Dibley!!

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