Introduction

Bernard Rosenthal

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511519352.001

Behind their victims came the afflicted, a guilty and miserable band; villains who had thus avenged themselves on their enemies, and viler wretches, whose cowardice had destroyed their friends; lunatics, whose ravings had chimed in with the madness of the land; and children, who had played a game that the imps of darkness might have envied them, since it disgraced an age, and dipped a people's hands in blood.

–Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Alice Doane's Appeal”

Few topics in American culture have received the broad attention received by the Salem witch trials. The subject of scholarly tomes, films, television shows, folklore, and newspaper cartoons, and the vehicle for countless metaphors of oppression and persecution, Salem has had a powerful hold on American imagination. An event that by some European standards of witchcraft persecutions would be relatively minor in its magnitude has achieved an archetypal status in our own country and in others.

The story begins in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village in Massachusetts Bay colony. In January or February of 1691 his 9-year-old daughter Betty and his 11-year-old niece, Abigail Williams, began suffering severely, or feigned such suffering – we will never know exactly which. According to the Reverend John Hale, Betty and Abigail

were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect.

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