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Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. By Elaine G. Breslaw. (New York: New York University Press, 1996. xxvi, 243 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8147-1227-4.) The Devil's Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials. By Peter Charles Hoffer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xxii, 279 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8018-5200-5.)
Among all the interesting episodes along the well-trodden path of seventeenth-century New England history, none has attracted more interpretive effort than the Salem witchcraft trials. A wide range of theories have been invoked to explain this episode, whose very bizarreness makes it stand out. Among many previous efforts to explain it, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's 1974 work, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, has been the most compelling. Boyer and Nissenbaum studied the factionalism behind the witchcraft accusations and linked it to the social tensions dividing the impoverished farmers of Salem Village from persons affiliated with the more cosmopolitan merchant culture of Salem Town. But however brilliant and useful, that analysis fails to explain why witchcraft accusations caught on like wildfire in Salem, while other places hosted witchcraft accusations that reflected similar social tensions but that never gained the momentum of Salem's craze.
The Salem episode is remarkable not simply because more people were accused of witchcraft and executed for that crime than in any other time and place in New England history, nor because it occurred after accusations of witchcraft had mostly died down elsewhere in the Western world. What stands out as most amazing is that so many different people bought into a fantastic story about the devil, his witches, and their nighttime gatherings. True, literal belief in supernatural reality was nothing new...