Seriously, though, Mather, just shut up already. You don’t live in Salem Village or Salem Town. You weren’t one of the judges during the trials. You keep butting your nose in and writing pamphlets no one asked for and vacillating like a see-saw and just generally being a ponderous Puritan pest. You don’t even have the coolest colonial name–that Oscar clearly goes to Wait Still Winthrop. I would just like to read one chapter of this excellent book that doesn’t have your name in it SOMEWHERE. Cool your sanctimonious jets, dude.
So now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem 1692 is indeed a great read. It’s a fascinating look into a topic that I thought I mostly knew already. I grew up in the Boston area and if you have never been to Salem on Halloween, I would encourage you to not actually go at all to be honest. It’s a mess of kitsch and flippancy, designed to help you forget that innocent people died there 300 years ago. Except, of course, that there were two Salems at that point. And today’s Salem isn’t even where all the victims came from. The complicated relationship between the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village (now Danvers, MA) is just one of the things that gets lost in the messy oversimplification most people know about. That’s where Schiff’s book comes in most handy.
In addition to the dynamics of the two Salems, Schiff digs deep into the Village’s tortured relationships with its town preachers, which they went through at a rapid clip. Like other scholars, she highlights the stresses of living in 17th century Puritan New England: the rigid societal expectations, the religious responsibilities, the harshness of the territory and the climate, the ever-present specter of violence with local Native tribes, and the true, deeply-held belief in the supernatural. She talks about the uncomfortable relationship that colonists had with the crown and the fact that Massachusetts was without a governor for a solid chunk of time leading up to the witch hunt. None of this was entirely new to me, though the details were appreciated. What did come as a major surprise, however, was the reason behind why the colony was leaderless. Shortly before the witch trials, a number of prominent Massachusetts citizens, unhappy with the royally-appointed court governor, engineered his overthrow. No less a personage than Increase Mather, father of Cotton, was sent to England to renegotiate the Massachusetts charter and bring back a new governor. The relationship between the residual effects of this, colonial unease with the Mother Country nearly a century before the Revolution, and the Witch Trials themselves (many prominent commentators and even witch trial judges had been part of the plot to overthrow the governor) is the crux of Schiff’s book, and it makes for a very intriguing theory.
