Volume 29, Number 17 · November 4, 1982
Witch Hunting
By Edmund S. Morgan
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
by John Putnam Demos
Oxford University Press, 543 pp., $25.00
So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there—fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many. In the past fifty years especially (almost as long as the Puritan experiment itself lasted), countless scholars have examined the New Englanders' villages and towns, their families and churches, their private lives and public lives—and their ideas about everything that they had ideas about. Some of the best American historical writing of the present century has resulted. John Demos has now produced a book that will rank with the best, a book that shows us how much we still may learn from these people.
Review, 2446 words
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