The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff

The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff
Buy The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: History
Reviewer: Lesley Mason
Summary: A highly readable, thoroughly detailed re-examination of the causes and progress of the Salem Witch Trials.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 512	Date: October 2015
Publisher: W&N
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1474602242
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Like most people I know the story of Salem through the very particular lens of The Crucible. That particular lens was the very current witch-hunt that was going on at the time. Arthur Miller's play is rightly seen as an allegory of the McCarthyism in 1950s America – but having read Schiff's more academic approach to the source tale, it's easy to see that Miller's drama is much more about the hunting down of the 'red menace' than about what might have happened in New England two hundred and fifty years earlier.

To enjoy Schiff's interpretation of events, you need to take a step back and set aside whatever you think you know about Salem.

This is easy to do… because it is exactly what she does.

Where Miller assembled a cast of about 20 characters, Shiff's dramatis personae (which she does list for reference at the beginning of the book) runs to 94. Her two or three line pen-portraits for each runs for nearly six pages, grouping them into "the parsonage", "other Salem villagers", "the core accusers", "some of the accused", "the Authorities", "among the Ministers" and "a few skeptics". The group headings alone seem to suggest that these near-hundred individuals are only the main players, and that many more could have been brought in to bear witness, were there but records left behind to do so.

Before we even get into the book, then, it's clear that this is a much further-reaching story than a mid-20th-century drama would have us believe. If that is the only thing you take away from reading this remarkable book, then maybe it will have done its job.

To be fair, on a very first reading of the book, it may well be the only thing you take away, because there is a huge amount of detail to assimilate - and I will not pretend to have done so on my own first reading. Is it fair to review the book, given what I've just said? I think so, because what you take away from a first reading is precisely what will determine whether there will ever be a second, third or dip-in-reference-reading to follow. If you are not engaged at the outset… the depth of research and knowledge is wasted upon you.

Here I can promise you: it won't be. You may only read this cover to cover once over, but having done so, if you are remotely interested in the early-Euro-American history (if I can put it like that), if you are fascinated by stories of witchcraft around the world, if you are interested in the Salem story specifically, if indeed you want to analyse Miller's drama more fully, if the role of religion in both the colonisation story of America and the subsequent break with the colonial masters is your curiosity-bug… any of these and no doubt more beside, will find something to ponder on in these pages.

For those who don't know: author Stacy Schiff is Pulitzer-prize-winning historian and biographer, whose work ranges from Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, to Cleopatra, from Saint-Exupéry to Benjamin Franklin.

One suspects, however, that none of those threw down the research challenges of a trial in a small New England village in the sixteen-nineties. She makes the point herself that while a surprising number of the protagonists could probably read, few them could (or a least did) write. Of those that did keep meticulous journals there are significant gaps for the months in the question… telling in itself.

There are a number of approaches that Schiff, even as a serious historian, could have taken to telling the tale of Salem: a simple factual tale of the trials themselves would have been gripping enough. She goes wider though. Her premise is that to fully understand Salem, you have to understand the context.

That context includes examination of all manner of contemporary influences: the relationship between the fledgling country and the far-away governors; the power struggle within the Presbyterian church at a very local level; continuing religious tensions between the Quakers and the Presbyterians (religious freedom might be why many of the first generation immigrants crossed the Atlantic – on Schiff's evidence they weren't to enjoy it for very long); the hardships of parsons expected to minister on rations that were little-enough when paid, and rarely paid in full; the ego of some of those ministers; the other power struggles common to close-knit communities (be aware how few people there were in these places back then); politics at local, national and international level; the spite of children and of servants and slaves; the sheer boredom of adolescent girls in a grey, grey world of hard work and harsh winters; the thrill of being centre of attention; the fear of the consequences if you didn't conform to the common opinion – especially once the hangings started; the myths and fairy-tales and bible stories learned by rote…

There is no one answer to what happened at Salem. There is a tightly woven tapestry of them. It is this tapestry that Schiff expertly unpicks. She then follows each thread, explaining the ins and outs of it. She quotes and queries her source material in equal measure. Where there are doubts, she raises questions, suggests possible and probable responses to them, but still leaves the reader to make their own determination.

She does all of this and she does it with a born-story-teller's skill. For all the depth of analysis, The Witches is surprisingly engaging. Utterly readable. Fascinating.

The characters become real people under her pen. The tension and farce of the courtroom cut against each other in a way that can only be perceived by a modern sensibility, whilst still retaining the dusty, fearful atmosphere of the time. Victims mount the scaffold with varying degrees of dignity and others escape and some simply die while waiting.

The whole is wrapped up with a brief "what happened next" to some of the main players, which is interesting in its own right.

Another side-line of the "I didn't know that" variety is the en passant analysis of how devilry and witchcraft overlap and diverge, but also how some traits of witchcraft 'travel' better than others. Broomsticks, for instance, not as common as you might think.

A stunning read; a useful reference.

Readers who appreciated this book might also enjoy Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts by Tracy Borman.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff at Amazon.com.

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