Volume 21, Number 13 · August 8, 1974
Satan in Salem
By Keith Thomas
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
by Paul Boyer, by Stephen Nissenbaum
Harvard University Press, 231 pp., $10.00
By the standards of seventeenth-century Europe the Salem witchcraft episode was a relatively trivial business. About 150 persons were accused, but only nineteen were actually executed. In addition a man was pressed to death for refusing to plead and several women died in prison. All the others were eventually released. By North American standards, however, this was a holocaust of unprecedented dimensions. There had been plenty of witchcraft trials in New England before 1692 and nearly a score of executions. But accusations had usually been directed against obscure and isolated individuals. Only in Salem did accusations of witchcraft get so out of hand that they came near to destroying the whole community. This happened, moreover, at the very time when in Europe witch trials were becoming increasingly anachronistic.
Review, 2396 words
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