Reviewed by Helena M. Wall | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Helena M. Wall | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Helena M. Wall, Pomona College

Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. By Richard Godbeer. New Narratives in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 192 pages. $20.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).
The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided. By Michael P. Winship. Landmark Law Cases and American Society. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 180 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).
A couple of years ago, I reviewed Michael P. Winship's Making Heretics.¹ Though praising the book's learning and0 lucidity, I expressed regret that it would be too demanding and specialized for classroom use. Winship has answered that lament in The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson, a volume that revisits Making Heretics in ways that retain the sophistication of the earlier book while making its issues and material clear, accessible, and interesting to a more general audience. Richard Godbeer's Escaping Salem also self-consciously addresses students and general readers and it, too, succeeds admirably. Each enters effectively and imaginatively into the physical, social, and mental worlds of early New Englanders; each offers important correctives to common misconceptions or utter failures of comprehension about those worlds; and each offers the general reader insights into the writing and relevance of history.	1
It is somewhat depressing to note that if Americans know one thing about early America it is the Salem witchcraft episode, usually filtered through a high school production of The Crucible. This is all the more disappointing because the Salem episode was itself aberrant in so many ways. Godbeer examines another 1692 witchcraft case in Stamford, Connecticut, that was far more typical. The fits, visions, and seemingly unnatural physical symptoms of a seventeen-year-old servant girl gave rise to suspicions of witchcraft. But, as Godbeer emphasizes, the responses of her household and neighbors and of the ministers and magistrates were far more cautious, nuanced, and varied than the caricature of rabid witch-hunters would predict. Godbeer shows the community of Stamford struggling to understand what was happening to young Kate Branch; testing her to determine her truthfulness; carefully weighing the credibility of her charges and the history and actions of the accused; and fearing the consequences of error, either by wrongfully condemning innocents or failing to protect the community from evil. In telling the story, Godbeer deftly portrays life in early New England communities: the day-to-day relationships and activities that made up the social integument of that world, the anxieties and precariousness of early modern life, and a mental and religious worldview that combined the supernatural and the empirical. Nowhere was this hybrid "scientific supernaturalism" (142) more evident than in the judges' scrupulous sifting of approved forms of proof and their rejection of spectral evidence, even when it meant opposing popular sentiment. Godbeer's early New England is not peopled by Nathaniel Hawthorne's "hard-faced dames" of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and hanging judges but by recognizable human beings who were complicated, flawed, sometimes fearful and weak, but trying to do the right thing in a world they did not fully understand and could not control, in which the dangers they faced were real and present.	2
Winship faces an even greater challenge than Godbeer, contending as he must with difficult issues of doctrinal interpretation, religious organization, status anxiety, and political intrigue, all bleeding into each other. But in lively and graceful prose and with great erudition lightly worn, Winship untangles central debates in reformed Protestantism, clarifies the meaning and importance of interpretive differences over the nature of salvation and assurance, and conveys the powerful tensions between Puritan impulses toward radical individualism on the one hand and an increasingly monolithic orthodoxy on the other. Perhaps the most compelling feature of the world Winship gives us is the urgency of these issues to the participants. Theirs was a world in which, they had no doubt, the Antichrist was abroad, the godly were under attack, and the final days approached. However difficult it may be for some historians to enter into that worldview, Winship makes it impossible to ignore how immediate were the dangers and how high were the stakes for the builders of that godly experiment in Massachusetts Bay.	. . .

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