Sarah Rivett

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Sarah Rivett | Our Salem, Our Selves | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Our Salem, Our Selves

PSYCHOLOGICAL transference, women on the margins, social repression, collapsing Puritan epistemology and semiotics, hallucinogenic mushrooms, magic, and traumatic military violence. These explanations are some of the more influential interpretations of what happened during the Salem witchcraft trials in the thirty-three years since Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum published their socioeconomic analysis in Salem Possessed. Their book inaugurated a new phase in Salem witchcraft scholarship by reading the event as the result of something other than Puritan superstition. Such readings often begin by reflecting on a set of historical anomalies that distinguished the Salem witchcraft trials from other witchcraft cases in New England and in the Old World. The witches were hanged, not burned. Confessing witches in Salem were set free though Exodus 22:18 clearly warned, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The trials came later than their European predecessors, causing Salem to sit disturbingly close to the scientific revolution and an emergent Enlightenment rationality. Coming at the onset of modernity, the Salem events of 1692 have made one particular historical question a near refrain: shouldn't people have known better by then? Known better, that is, than to admit spectral evidence into the trials as the legal basis for the conviction of accused witches. What was Cotton Mather thinking when, against increasing criticism from Boston, he defended spectral evidence in Wonders of the Invisible World a full year after his father's own anonymous tract interrupted the trials in the early fall of 1692, granting a stay of execution to the convicted and reprieve to a number still awaiting trial?¹ Salem must be about something other than witches, demons, superstitious clergy, and hysterical children. Otherwise it simply does not make sense.	1
The trials and their attendant circumstances and events have garnered a great deal of attention from scholars trying to make sense of Salem. The methods employed to arrive at the various interpretations and sociocultural interventions perpetuate the idea that scholarly analysis will counteract the incongruity and incomprehensibility of the event, eventually leading to a satisfying explanation of it. This desire for a rational explanation is the culminating, if unspoken, goal of Salem scholarship; the method for arriving there involves combing over the sequence of occurrences with ever-greater scrutiny while having recourse to disparate sociological perspectives. These Forum articles reflect this bidirectional pattern in Salem scholarship, further nuancing the archive with new methodologies. Richard Latner and Benjamin C. Ray approach late-seventeenth-century Salem with formidable accuracy. In a methodologically innovative use of geographic information systems technology, Ray convincingly constructs a new map in which the locations of town and village inhabitants do not align as neatly according to accusers and accused as they had in Boyer and Nissenbaum's study. Latner complements this revisionist intervention, reading the tax records in the decades preceding the witchcraft trials to challenge Boyer and Nissenbaum's economic narrative. Margo Burns and Bernard Rosenthal expand and reframe the archive through their ambitious, forthcoming Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, which calls into question the case-study model for organizing Salem. This new edition promises to correct misperceptions by articulating "the sequence and concurrence of events with a degree of precision previously impossible."²	2
Proposing and refining precise frameworks that will explain a seemingly irrational event, which are also the tasks of the historian and literary critic, summarize where we are in Salem scholarship. We explain the inexplicable, redact the intricacies of a complex situation, and identify a series of causal events that precipitate a particular outcome. The future of Salem scholarship will invariably follow this pattern of redaction, rationalization, and explanation. Worth considering before it does, though, is the odd juxtaposition between the precision of the analytic apparatus applied to Salem and the perceived irrationality of the event. Since Salem Possessed Salem scholars have been asking the historical question, What was really happening in Salem? Let's ask an integrally related historiographical question, Why are we so invested in returning to this event with the latest tools of social science, economic history, or anthropology, and doing so with "a degree of precision previously impossible?" What do we imagine we will find or better explain?	. . .

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