Richard Latner

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Richard Latner | Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem's Witch-Hunters Modernization's Failures? | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem's Witch-Hunters Modernization's Failures?

THE 1692 Salem witchcraft outbreak has had an enduring capacity for attracting popular and scholarly attention. It combines a compelling and sometimes heroic narrative with the dark allure of subverting American exceptionalist assumptions of tolerance, compromise, conciliation, and harmony. Richly complex and layered, it is continuously amenable to fresh investigation. Thus, though the harvest of books and articles on Salem may deter researchers from this well-trodden terrain, ample rewards may result not only from formulating new interpretations but also from reexamining prevailing conceptualizations.	1
Recent Salem scholarship has moved significantly beyond the traditional accounts associated with Charles W. Upham and Marion L. Starkey, who viewed the witchcraft outbreak as an exceptional yet alltoo- understandable manifestation of Puritanism in an "age of superstition." Since the 1970s scholars have applied social and cultural history, geography, anthropology, and gender studies to reveal Salem not only as an intricate tale of woe but also as an integral part of the landscape of early American history. Studies of witchcraft, magic, and religion have demonstrated the widespread nature of magical beliefs and practices in early modern America and England. Other accounts, focusing on women's preeminent role as witchcraft's victims, confessors, and afflicted, have applied psychological insights to illuminate the socialstructural context of witchcraft in New England. Meanwhile a commendable biography of Samuel Parris, Salem Village's minister at the time of the outbreak, and the publication of Parris's sermons have located Salem more precisely within the era's religious developments, complementing research that has underscored the distinctive religious, demographic, and geographic patterns of settlement in Salem Town and Village. Mary Beth Norton has fitted the Salem outbreak into a "broader crisis that produced the trials," contending that without an ongoing frontier battle between colonists and Native Americans, the "Essex County witchcraft crisis of 1692 would not have occurred." Salem witchcraft, an episode that eminent colonial New England historian Perry Miller labeled "peripheral" and discounted as having "no effect" on New England's ecclesiastical, political, institutional, or ideological development, continues to be a case study in creative historical investigation.¹	2
Within this seemingly inexhaustible world of modern Salem scholarship, one study holds a special place and continues to influence and shape the discussion of Salem witchcraft. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's 1974 Salem Possessed revitalized New England witchcraft studies and won the American Historical Association's John H. Dunning Prize. A decade later, in his historiographical assessment of witchcraft studies, David D. Hall claimed that witchcraft investigations had "entered a new phase" with this work and that the book's argument was "too well known to need restating in detail"; another prominent witchcraft historian upholds its authoritative status as the "most ambitious modern attempt to explain the Salem episode."²	3
Minimizing the singularity of the Salem witch hunt, Boyer and Nissenbaum grounded the outbreak in the "prosaic, everyday lives of obscure and inarticulate men and women" whose "lives were being shaped by powerful forces of historical change." The specific nature of this historical change was nothing less than the inexorable movement toward commerce and capitalism embodied in the increased bustle and prominence of Salem Town. Salem Possessed deftly subsumed the petty personal quarrels featured in many early accounts into an archetypal clash between the agricultural hinterland of Salem Village, an area grounded in "pre-capitalistic patterns of village existence," and its ever more cosmopolitan neighbor, Salem Town. Constrained by diminished land availability, the village's economy was, at best, holding its own; relative to the increased wealth of Salem Town, it was falling behind.³	. . .

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