Salem Trials Research Articles

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Salem Trials (1692) in History and in Miller’s The Crucible: Investigating truth claims in historical narratives and drama

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is, in the first instance, a literary reconstruction of a historical event: the Salem trials that took place in the village of Salem in Essex County, New England (today Danvers, Massachusetts) in 1692. As Miller explains in his autobiography Timebends (1987), and as is clear from his introduction to the play, he not only carried out scholarly research in preparation for writing the play, he also reflected explicitly on how he had used the historical material to reconstruct a story. The central issue in this investigation is the position taken by the play with regard to writing history – historiography – and to the question: what is historical truth? How does the play relate to the issues of representing history and historical truth? To answer these questions, I will, in this research, give an extensive overview of the historical debates about witchcraft in order to situate Miller’s position on this topic. Further, I will position Miller’s work within more general debates about historiography and the historian’s possibilities of rendering a historical ‘truth’.

Actualising History

Whereas prior studies have focused on Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible in relation to the Puritan past of the United States of America, this article looks at the play’s present in relation to a future. If, as is the case, the play is an intervention in its contemporary circumstances, this is obviously with the aim of moving towards a better future. The question then becomes: how does the play deal with the past in the way that the Salem trials (1692) relate, by means of a theatrical intervention, to a future? In the twentieth century the relation of theatre, and of theatricality in general, with the future was paradigmatically explored in the work of Bertolt Brecht. In his view, the role of theatre was to produce a distance, not an unreflexive and emotional involvement in a plot. This distance or alienation was necessary to make people see behind the scenes of the socio-political and economic system, as a result of which they would start to think and become able to act in order to change the course of history. This appears to be an essential strategy as well if we think about the powers of spectacle, as they have been dealt with in previous studies in performance research, and a possible theatrical response to them.

Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England

Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, by Emerson W. Baker

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, by Emerson W. Baker

Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic HorrorJamesGoho. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror James Goho. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.This collection of essays examines what author calls dread... primal fear and an ontological unease in world (3). Containing ten chapters, six of which are revisions of previously published essays, Goho explores four themes found in Gothic literature. These four include urban landscape, wilderness, manifestation of economic, social, and political anxieties and conflicts, and a voice which is given to those who suffer or experience evil (3, 4). Essays consider five American and two British authors, including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lo veer aft, and Fritz Leiber.According to author, all four of themes mentioned above can be found in fiction of Charles Brockden Brown. Goho states that Brown created not just American Urban Gothic, but American Gothic as a whole. Flis novels depict family disintegration and individual disintegration through collisions with uncanny (7). Goho discusses three of Brown's novels in this chapter with Wieland being an example of how isolation of wilderness can turn a family man into a killer; Arthur Mervyn being an example of how disease can turn civilized people into savages; and, Edgar Huntly being an example of how civilized man turns into a savage in wilderness, when confronted with savages who are already there (American Indians.Likewise, these four themes can be found in a variety of works that trace their beginning to Salem trials. Witchcraft, an Old World phenomenon, found fertile ground in New World among the dark, brooding side of Puritanism (163), fear of Indians and vast, potentially hostile wilderness. Attempting to escape economic, political, social, and religious injustice, colonists merely recreated New World in image of Old. He examines a number of witch narratives, such as those by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Fritz Leiber, and John Updike. Anyone who reads contemporary horror fiction or watches films in genre knows that is not dead. Rather she is a continuing archetype because... [she] speaks to a primal fear. It is not fear of a witch; rather is fear of relentless and violent persecution (176) that induces us to read or watch these instantiations of Gothic.Goho analyzes four short works by prolific British writer Arthur Machen that reflect third theme of Gothic. These are Great God Pan, Inmost Light, Shining Pyramid, and White People. These stories were written in late Victorian era; all concern science and ask question, Do ends justify means? The male scientists in stories certainly believe answer is yes, and each story illustrates what they are willing to do for knowledge's sake. In each story, women are victims of horrific experiments, and, in all, these women die violent deaths. In end, says author, it is all about sacrifice of women to appease desires of men for knowledge and control (73).Algernon Blackwood's Canadian stories, according to Goho, propose that nature is wondrous but perilous (93). Stories such as Wendigo and Haunted Island reveal wilderness landscape as sublime, intensely beautiful, and awe-inspiring, but terrifying in its vastness. It harkens back to our early ancestors and their fear of dark and all that dark contained. And, speaks to fear of loneliness as well. Confronted with wilderness' majesty, one feels how truly small and alone one is. Goho believes that Blackwood's short stories yield a forest beautifully described and ... more alive and sentient than human characters (92).Whereas Blackwood presents wilderness as a backdrop upon which to expose humankind's loneliness, Fritz Leiber sets against urban landscape. …

Emerson W. Baker.A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience.

Emerson W. Baker.<i>A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience</i>.

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. By Emerson W. Baker (New York, Oxford University Press, 2014) 416 pp. $29.95

<i>A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience</i>. By Emerson W. Baker (New York, Oxford University Press, 2014) 416 pp. $29.95

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience

Introduction: An Old Valuables Chest Chapter One: Satan's Storm Chapter Two: The City upon a Hill Chapter Three: Drawing Battle Lines in Salem Village Chapter Four: The Afflicted Chapter Five: The Accused Chapter Six: The Judges Chapter Seven: An Inextinguishable Flame Chapter Eight: Salem End Chapter Nine: Witch City?

A storm of witchcraft: the Salem trials and the American experience

A storm of witchcraft: the Salem trials and the American experience

Oky ontatechiata

This article focuses on the Wendat Panic of 1635–1645.While details of popular moral panics such as the Salem Trials of the 1690s are replete, historians continue to question not only the general characteristics of witchcraft in Native society (how it functioned on a day-to-day basis) but also more specific queries concerning the degree to which Native witchcraft was a colonial product and the influence of social structures such as gender and class on accusations. By applying an ethnohistorical approach to several seventeenth-century Wendat case studies, brief glimpses into the Wendat world are uncovered and serve to answer some of these questions. Taken as a whole, an investigation into the Wendat experience places unique Wendat notions of witchcraft within the more general human historical context of the early modern world.

Review: Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials, by Brian A. Pavlac

Review: <i>Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials</i>, by Brian A. Pavlac

The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries , and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries, and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century April Lidinsky (bio) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Mary Klages. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2004, 1384 pp., $45.00 paper. The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Shay Brawn. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2008, 1456 pp., $45.00 paper. While readers will surely gain upper-body strength from toting the splendid two-volume Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, their size also makes an argument: “Look how much we have been missing!” Academics sometimes assume that the white, male American literature canon has been corrected; after all, haven’t we been reading and writing about alternative voices for decades now? But students still commonly emerge from even good high schools nearly untouched by American women writers beyond Harper Lee, a small dose of Emily Dickinson, and perhaps a novel by Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison. The students entering our college literature classrooms may know only the narrowest range of American women’s literary voices. Further, gender and women’s studies departmental survey courses, often still canon-heavy, hardly leave room for lesser-known texts to add more than a dash of diversity to the feast of American literature. How many new voices are enough? And, O weighty judgment: Which voices? Who could envy the task before general editors Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, and Shay Brawn, who, along with their coeditors, set out to offer a fresh perspective on the varied landscape of American literature? The prefaces of the two volumes—Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries and Volume Two: The 20th Century—offer conversation-sparking reflections about “how fraught” the categories of “ ‘American’ and ‘Literature’ truly are” (Hogeland and Klages 2004, xxix). The editors explicitly build on feminist scholarship that works to “make these forgotten texts breathe again, knowing that their vitality will fundamentally alter the ways we think about American literature, American history, and the cultural constructions of identity, such as gender” (xxiii). With the cultural work of literature cast this way, they also remind us that the skeptical question beneath proposed revisions to the Grand Old Canon—“Is it any good?”—sidesteps what critic Jane Tompkins argues are more significant questions: “ ‘Good for whom?’ ‘When?’ and ‘Why?’ ” (1985, 2), and, I would add, [End Page 130] “According to whose opinion? In relation to what agenda?” The editors invite students to consider these big questions as they usefully lay bare their decision to select texts that “represent ways that women’s voices enter into public discourse” (xxiv), noting that they privilege “certain themes and topics that have been underrepresented” in other anthologies, such as sexualities, disabilities, and the rights of native peoples and people of color. For instructors, the texts have been selected “with an eye toward ways they might work together in provocative and teachable constellations” (xxviii), and the editors offer a range of topics and issues that would allow students to dwell in a specific historical moment or to make connections over centuries. In sum, this is a text for teachers, made transparently inviting for students. Volume One differs from most American literature anthologies, in which readers’ fingers trail far down a table of contents of male writers before happening upon some Anne Bradstreet poems. The Aunt Lute collection includes generous selections by Bradstreet, but opens with “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown,” an explosive record of the 1637 heresy trial. This fiery text makes evident that Hutchinson’s gender is on trial as well as her theology (“not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex” [1]), and launches this volume with apocalyptic energy. The editors include excerpts from Salem trials and a thick slice of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, along with lesser-known texts such as “The Life of Mary Read” and “The Life of...

:Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials

:<i>Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials</i>

Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials (review)

Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials (review)

Euskera. 2010, 55, 2. 1047-1051. Bilbo issn 0210-1564 Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials

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Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials. By Brian Pavlac (Santa Barbara, Greenwood Press [cloth]; Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press [paper], 2009), 228 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper

<i>Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials.</i> By Brian Pavlac (Santa Barbara, Greenwood Press [cloth]; Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press [paper], 2009), 228 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper

Witch hunts in the Western world: persecution and punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem trials

Preface Chronology Chapter One: An Introduction to the Witch Hunts Chapter Two: Medieval Origins of the Witch Hunts Chapter Three: Witch Hunting in the Holy Roman Empire Chapter Four: The Witch Hunts in France Chapter Five: Witch Hunting in the British Realms Chapter Six: Witch Hunting in Southern Europe Chapter Seven: Witch Hunting in Northern and Eastern Europe Chapter Eight: Beyond the Witch Hunts Glossary Selected Bibliography

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials": Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials":Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis Waltraud Maierhofer (bio) The Crucible (1953), by pre-eminent American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), has become widely acknowledged as a timeless play about the hunt for "witches" and other supposed evildoers, and about mass hysteria. According to a popular introduction to this work, the inspiration for Arthur Miller's play was The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), a historical study, albeit not without fictional elements, about the Salem witch trials by Marion Starkey.1 It is a little-known fact that the German-Jewish émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884, Munich–21 December 1958, Los Angeles) published a play about the Salem trials before Arthur Miller did. It was published in German under the title Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston (Mania or The Devil in Boston) in 1948 in Los Angeles.2 A first sketch is dated 22 October 1945.3 Feuchtwanger began writing the play in the final months of 1946 and finished it in late 1947. I. The Devil in Boston The play premiered in Germany in March 1949, in the "Kleines Theater im Zoo" in Frankfurt am Main, directed by Fred Schroer. Feuchtwanger wrote a short statement about his play for the program, "Zu meinem Stück" (About My Play).4 The premiered version was slightly revised from the first American edition in German, and subsequent performances (Deutsches Theater Berlin, March 1949; Nürnberg, 1949) and book editions followed.5 Several stages of typescript translations in English are extant in the Feuchtwanger Archive at the University of Southern California, the first [End Page 355] dated August 1947. The titles vary slightly from Delusion to Boston to Devil in Boston, which appears to have met Feuchtwanger's final approval, and a corrected copy is marked "Copyright 1948").6 Feuchtwanger wanted to have the play performed in the United States in English, but was not immediately successful.7 The American-language premiere did not take place until February 1952 at the Circle Theatre in Hollywood (directed by Benjamin Zemach), where it remained in the repertoire for only half a year.8 Another staging, of a Yiddish translation by N[athaniel] Buchwald, took place the next year in New York by the Yiddish Theater Ensemble, in Barbiyon Plaza. Morris Carnovsky directed and performed in this production.9 Arthur Miller's Crucible (1953) premiered on Broadway on 22 January 1953 and was published that same year. Initially, it was not as sweepingly successful as it later became. Feuchtwanger's drama had its New York premiere in February 1953. The audience, including the critics, did not know of its earlier publication in German and its staging on the West Coast, leading one critic to label it as "Another Play On Salem Witches."10 Reviews of the New York performance immediately compared the two: Vernon Rice pointed out that Feuchtwanger's play had fewer dramatic high points, while his simpler plot and setting fared favorably with John Chapman. It is not important for the following argument whether the two writers knew about each other's plays and whether one might have influenced the other,11 although it remains a valid question. Both draw attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of suspicion, denunciation, persecution, and extermination. Their approaches are very different in that Miller shows trial scenes onstage, while Feuchtwanger has them reported. Both fictionalize one of the "bewitched" girls and main plaintiffs, and incorporate love interests in her characterization, but these choices result in decisive plot differences. However, my goal is not to compare the two plays, but rather to examine the specific perspective of a stateless immigrant on this "American" topic, which the German-Jewish writer here applies to postwar, post-Nazi Germany. Even Feuchtwanger scholarship tends to bypass this play. For example, a recent study on the reception of Feuchtwanger's works in Germany since 1945 only briefly touches on the play, stating as evident that it represented the author's reaction to the beginning of the McCarthy era and intended to draw parallels between persecutions of "witches" and leftists.12 Only [End Page 356] one short comparison with Miller's Crucible has been undertaken, in which Robert...

Confess or Deny? What's a "Witch" to Do?

When I teach about the Salem trials, students typically ask two related questions: “why were women accused of witchcraft more often than men?” and “why would a woman confess to witchcraft if she really didn't do it?” This essay attempts to answer both of these questions. But, first, what was a “witch”? For Puritans, a witch was a person who made a pact with the devil, thus giving the devil permission to use her body to harm others and lure them into his service. This definition highlights something important about the Puritan world—it was the scene of a cosmic struggle between God and Satan. Puritan New Englanders accepted the devil's presence and believed he could come to earth, seduce victims to sign his book or covenant, and enlist sinners in his war against God. Witches could be male or female, but in New England they tended to be women. In fact, so many of the accused witches in Salem were women (approximately 78 percent) that it is worth exploring Puritan attitudes towards women, sin, and the devil. It would be easy, but inaccurate, to characterize the Puritans simply as misogynists. In fact, Puritan New Englanders considered themselves to be rather more enlightened than others when it came to women's place in society and in their cosmology. They did not subscribe to the prevailing European view that women were inherently more evil than men. And yet womanhood and witchcraft were inextricably linked both to each other and to Puritan interpretations of evil and sin (1).