Why was the Massachusetts bay colony a likely place for belief in witchcraft?

Answer 1

In 1691, this notorious episode in the history of early New England began to unfold in a small rural neighborhood on the outskirts of Salem town, then the second-largest seaport in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Several adolescent girls in Salem Village began to exhibit strange and alarming symptoms that some of their parents quickly came to interpret as the result of witchcraft. When urged by those adults to identify who had bewitched them, the girls first named several of their neighbors in Salem Village and then gradually widened the circle of those accused to include hundreds of people in Salem town and other Massachusetts Bay communities. By the spring of 1692 the jails were crowded with suspects, and before the hysteria at last subsided at the end of that year, twenty people had been executed for witchcraft-which was treated as a capital crime in seventeenth-century New England, as it was elsewhere in early modern Europe.

This is only the briefest outline of the Salem tragedy. For a full narrative of events, you can consult either the opening chapter of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed, or a more recent work by Peter Hoffer, The Devil's Disciples. [See Works Cited link at end of essay.] After reading either of these sources, you'll understand why so many historians have been drawn to this riveting topic. Indeed, the witchcraft outbreak in Salem Village is probably the single most intensively studied event in colonial North American history.

What commands so much notice is, in part, the peculiarity of what happened at Salem Village within the broader context of British North American experience. While similar witch crazes had wracked many early modern European communities and often resulted in mass trials and executions, most cases of witchcraft in colonial communities (nearly all of them in New England) typically involved only one suspect, and relatively few prosecutions ended in the execution of the accused witch. (For a thorough overview of such cases, all of which occurred before the Salem outbreak, see John Demos'sEntertaining Satan.) Viewed in this light, what happened in Salem Village is, as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison aptly noted, only "a small episode in the history of a great superstition."

Yet it is precisely the uniqueness of Salem Village hysteria in colonial experience that has fascinated so many scholars. By probing the underlying causes of this protracted outbreak, they hope to gain deeper insight into broader tensions and conflicts that beset a maturing provincial society at the end of the seventeenth century. For example, in Salem Possessed, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum contend that the witchcraft hysteria registered the strains attending the emergence of a commercial economy in New England generally and the wider Salem community specifically. In their view, what prompted accusations of witchcraft were the anxieties and resentments festering among some Salem Village families who were faltering and falling behind in a society being rapidly transformed by the quest for profit and material comforts. By contrast, in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Carol Karlsen argues that accusations of witchcraft both in Salem Village and elsewhere in New England, which targeted in disproportionate numbers those women who stood to inherit property, reflected the depth of misogyny within this Puritan culture.

Still other historians have turned their attention toward Salem Village because it figures as a spectacular example of how "pagan" forms of supernatural belief endured even in the fervently Christian culture of Puritan New England. As David Hall (Worlds of Wonders, Days of Judgement) and Richard Godbeer (The Devil's Dominion) have shown, what the case of Salem Village vividly illustrates is the remarkable persistence among all early New Englanders of beliefs in witchcraft and magic, demonical possession and angelic visitations, spectral apparitions, prophetic dreams, and portents. Not only did the wealthy and learned credit such phenomena as readily as humbler folk, but such convictions coexisted easily with their devotion to Puritanism. In short, New Englanders (and, indeed, all early Americans, as Jon Butler emphasizes in his most recent book,Awash in a Sea of Faith) inhabited a complex supernatural universe, one in which Christian doctrines and practices were mingled with varied beliefs in "a world of wonders."