|
|
|
Salem Revisited
Carol F. Karlsen
| ONCE upon a time, historians paid little attention to witchcraft in early New England. Apparently, they shared Perry Miller's conviction (mentioned in Richard Latner's Forum contribution) that the 1692 Salem outbreak held little real significance for the region's history. If so Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed and their three-volume The Salem Witchcraft Papers changed all that.1 Witchcraft studies have never been the same. |
1
|
|
Like many others this brief tale simultaneously informs and obscures. For more than three decades, the influence of Salem Possessed has been monumental, profoundly shaping the way other historians, students, and general readers have understood the causes of the 1692 witch trials. The Salem Witchcraft Papers, moreover, was an enormous boon to scholarship and teaching, for the first time enabling researchers to access relevant trial records on local campuses rather than traveling to Massachusetts to read them. Still, my emphasis on Boyer and Nissenbaum's ability to turn history around hides the role of several other groups of authors in this process: nonhistorians, such as Marion L. Starkey and Arthur Miller, who interpreted the Salem outbreak prior to the 1970s; non-Americanists, including British historian Keith Thomas, as well as feminist thinkers, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, who indirectly encouraged colonial American historians to ask fresh questions about religion and gender in New England's witchcraft cases; and other American historians, especially Chadwick Hansen and John Putnam Demos, who expanded the history of colonial witchcraft beyond Salem or otherwise took us in new social, cultural, and psychological directions.2 My reference to Perry Miller and my fairy-tale opening speak to and mask my own agenda, which is to celebrate how far witchcraft history has come in recent decades, to highlight some interpretive disputes half-buried in these three articles, to argue for less evasion and more evidence in carrying on these disputes, and to call for greater distinctions between fact and interpretation in the witchcraft stories we tell in the future. |
2
|
|
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, introduced in this Forum by Margo Burns and Bernard Rosenthal, two of its main editors, promises to be a wonderful addition to the scholarly resources on the 1692–93 Salem trials.3 Most of the arguments they make for this comprehensive new edition of the surviving legal records are persuasive. With the help of several associate editors, they have corrected earlier errors; clarified confusing language; added all court documents discovered since Boyer and Nissenbaum published the Works Progress Administration's typed transcripts; identified the many original recorders of handwritten manuscripts, noting the timing and idiosyncrasies of their entries; and sorted out the order of court appearances of accused witches and their accusers and defenders. We can now have greater confidence in the sequence of events in Salem because each legal document appears in chronological order. What's a scholar not to like about such an updated collection? |
. . . |
There are about 1847 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
