skygiants

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.