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America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem, Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2013. 289pp. $34.95 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Dan Dervin
Owen Davies opens his compelling account of witchcraft in all its awful manifestations with the aftermath of the 1692 Salem witch trials: "nineteen people executed, one man pressed to death during interrogation, and four others perished in jail," with many more bereaved and traumatized in a community devastated and ever after identified with these horrors. The shocking trial should have ended this sorry chapter in our colonial history, but the author demonstrates that other alleged practices, accusations, and trials flared up like brush fires across the land for centuries, with casualties far exceeding the original figures.
A historian at the University of Hertfordshire, Davies, so his jacket copy informs us, has "written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine," and one can readily picture him haunting countless newspaper morgues in far-flung cities and towns, while along the way consuming obscure memoirs and popular histories. He has done his homework, and the result is an extensive round-up of collective and individual craziness over subsequent centuries, some stemming from real events, such as the suddenly sickening of cattle, others from purely hallucinatory accounts, as of a young woman turning into a horse in her bed and being ridden off in the night by a raving witch.
Davies casts his nets widely to encompass not only European origins, but also African-American customs, and Native American medicine. While the accused were mostly women, they might also be suspected of consorting with male witches and devils, especially those set off by color or race. Extrapolating from English Common Law, colonial trials proceeded apace, arbitrated by ill-educated squires and fueled by the hysterias we associate with Salem; and although there were acquittals, casualties...