Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History 1638–1693, Second Edition

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Description

This superb documentary collection illuminates the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting in seventeenth-century New England. The cases examined begin in 1638, extend to the Salem outbreak in 1692, and document for the first time the extensive Stamford-Fairfield, Connecticut, witch-hunt of 1692–1693. Here one encounters witch-hunts during the eyes of people who participated in them: the accusers, the sufferers, the judges. The original texts tell in vivid detail a multi-dimensional story that conveys not only the process of witch-hunting but in addition the complexity of culture and society in early The us. The documents capture deep-rooted attitudes and expectations and reveal the tensions, anger, envy, and misfortune that underlay communal life and circle of relatives relationships within New England’s small towns and villages.

Primary sources include court depositions in addition to excerpts from the diaries and letters of contemporaries. They cover trials for witchcraft, reports of diabolical possessions, suits of defamation, and reports of preternatural events. Every section is preceded by headnotes that describe the case and its background and refer the reader to necessary secondary interpretations. In his incisive introduction, David D. Hall addresses quite a lot of necessary issues: witchcraft lore, antagonistic social relationships, the vulnerability of women, religious ideologies, popular and learned understandings of witchcraft and the devil, and the role of the legal system. This volume is an extraordinarily significant resource for the study of gender, village politics, religion, and popular culture in seventeenth-century New England.

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