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Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 Benjamin C. Ray. University of Virginia Press, 2015.
The Salem Witch Trials were a spectacular episode in American colonial history. The accusations of witchcraft against neighbors by a group of seemingly afflicted girls led to a frenzy of fear that transfixed Puritan Massachusetts in 1692. Before it ran its course, over 150 people had been imprisoned and twenty executed. Four other prisoners died in jail. As the trials came to an end, a war of words erupted. A prosperous merchant and mathematician named Thomas Brattle penned a letter highly critical of the proceedings. A forerunner of the Enlightenment, he expressed skepticism about the magical torments inflicted on the accusing girls. On the other hand, the distinguished minister Cotton Mather defended the witch prosecutions with his Wonders of the Invisible World (1692). Mather believed that the punishment of the accused had saved Massachusetts from a satanic plot. Echoes of these two positions have reverberated in American arts and letters to the present day. Nathaniel Hawthorne's regret that an ancestor played a leading role in the Salem trials helped inspire his The...