The story of the 1692 Salem Village witchcraft outbreak is a fairly minor, though well-recorded, topic in world history. Its popular fascination continues to be out of proportion to its relative historical importance and remains the subject of innumerable scholarly as well as popular books and articles.

Unlike most of the previous witchcraft cases in old and New England, a significant number of the legal papers of the 1692/93 Massachusetts proceedings have survived. Today, preserved within judicial archives and various manuscript repositories, are around 950 of these legal and court papers representing more than 140 individually named witchcraft cases. Included among these documents are complaints, warrants and returns, mittimuses, depositions, preliminary examinations, indictments, summonses, recognizances, petitions, letters, and confessions. The Salem witchcraft cases have always afforded researchers a fairly extensive accumulation of primary source documents representing a diversity of people, yet combined into a body of knowledge that is manageable enough to be examined by authors and historians in microcosm. In popular culture the topic also possesses both the mysterious quality of the occult and a “Who dunnit?” mystique, factors that have combined to keep Salem witchcraft an active subject of popular history and university presses.

Many of these researchers into the Salem witchcraft events have, however, relied heavily upon printed transcripts of the original documents replicated in seventeenth-century writings of Cotton Mather, Robert Calef, and John Hale, as well as later transcriptions of the documents produced during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Unfortunately such a reliance upon gathered transcripts, with their various inherent transcription weaknesses, including misread words, deletion of words and lines of text and other similar mistakes creeping into the transcripts, has resulted in minor and even major mistakes becoming accepted as part of the traditional body of facts. It was the realization of this imprecision of previous transcription projects and the complexity of creating a new, more accurate edition that led this new work's editorin-chief Bernard Rosenthal to ask others to join him as Associate Editors to create a new, more accurate and comprehensive edition. The project has required retranscribing all extant manuscripts.