The Witches: Salem, 1692, a History by Stacy Schiff (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 2015 496pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4766-0224-2

The early 1690s were years of considerable anxiety in the New England colonies that were faced with spectral threats and actual threats from Native Americans and from without by a resurgent English state for whom colonies were not merely political adjuncts but economic opportunities. After fifty years of being largely left to themselves, from the early 1680s Charles II and then, after the ‘Glorious Revolution in 1688-89, William III asserted royal control over the colonies.  In 1691, he granted Massachusetts a new charter that established it as a royal colony. The charter affirmed the Crown’s authority to appoint the governor and naval officers to supervise ports, while guaranteeing that delegates to the colonial assembly were to be popularly elected by property-owning males.  This changing political situation reinforced already existing tensions within communities between those whose mission lay, much as the early ‘pilgrims’, who emigrated to the English colonies in New England to escape religious persecution, in establishing and maintaining ‘plantations of religion’ and those who simply wanted to establish plantations. The essential paradox of Salem — the thing that makes it worth returning to — is that it took place so late, in the twilight of the long age of European witch-hunting and among sophisticated and ambitious people, who were in most ways radical and in some respects out-and-out avant-garde. How could such a thing happen then, and there, among them? How do good people, reasonable people, do great evil?  This was a society in which there was certainly about the presence of evil and the devil in society and when tensions is society seemed insolvable and attitudes irreconcilable, finding scapegoats on whom to transfer the community’s paranoia and angst found ready expression in the charge of witchcraft.  The agonies of Salem were bound in place and time, in ways that demand a knowingness about ideas as well as a feeling for faces and weather.

It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter started to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later after nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbours accused neighbours, parents accused children, husbands accused wives, children accused their parents, and siblings each other. Between 144 and 185 witches were named in 25 villages and towns. Spectral visions of women flying through the air, or turning into cats and birds, were used as evidence. Girls, believed to be ‘bewitched’ victims, provided a ghastly sideshow of fits and contortions to the gallery to corroborate the workings of sorcery.

Vividly capturing the dark, unsettled atmosphere of seventeenth-century America, Stacy Schiff draws us into this anxious time. She shows us how a band of adolescent girls brought the nascent colony to its knees, and how quickly the epidemic of accusations, trials, and executions span out of control. Above all, Schiff reveals details and complexity that few other historians have identified. Every detail of colonial life just decades after the first landing - family, farming, praying, housekeeping, dangers of life at wilderness’s edge, estrangement from England, the pressures of a life dominated by Biblical thought - is rendered with a clarity that makes almost inconceivable events comprehensible. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, as magnificently written as it is deeply researched, the volume breathes new life into one of history’s most enduring mysteries.