Translucent cats, balls of fire, yellow birds, spectral women perched on roof beams: Salem’s puritans lived in a dull, damp, muddy-hemmed world, but as Stacy Schiff’s account of the most infamous of all witch trials shows, the creatures they imagined in the heat of the hysteria that gripped them during 1692 offered lurid compensation. Fourteen women and five men were executed for witchcraft during that terrible Massachusetts year, just a fraction of those accused of pinching and poking a chorus of convulsing “visionary” adolescent girls, or of suckling demons, or appearing by the beds of God-fearing men and women. Burrowing deep into her sources, Schiff enters the world of accusers and accused, finding the humanity and horror in the grim gothic landscape of meeting house, parsonage and gallows. Her psychological insights are compelling, exploring how the fearful repressions of a Puritan childhood and the pressures of small-town isolation could have led to such extreme events. She is firstly a masterful storyteller, though, bringing these characters, her own cast of witch’s poppets out of their 17th-century gloom and into chattering, shaking, finger-pointing life.
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