A draft.....FINALLY

OK, I lie. Not a complete draft, but at least something of (hopefully) some substance.


Analyse different opinions on the cause/s of the Salem witch trials. How and why has this event been interpreted differently?

A hypothetical conversation between some Salem Witch Trial historians:
Mather: ‘The Salem witch trials were evidently inflicted from the demons of the invisible world.’
Hutchinson: ‘Hold up. As a man of the Enlightenment, I must inform you that there are no such things as demons. The ‘Afflicted’ were altogether guilty of fraud and imposture.’
Boyer: ‘That’s far too simple a deduction. Economic and philosophical factionalism between Salem Town and Salem Village allowed for the trials to escalate as they did.’
Nissenbaum: ‘Exactly. With a lack of autonomy and power in town politics, the trials provided opportunities for the pro-Parris faction to treat the others not as political opposition, but as morally defective individuals.’
Carporeal: ‘Well I think it was a physiological condition, like convulsive Ergotism.’
Spanos: ‘Stupid woman! You and Matossian provide no conclusive evidence! Gottlieb and I show the trials can clearly be accounted for within a social psychological framework.’
Kences: ‘The importance of the wars between the New Englanders and the native Indians cannot be underestimated either.’
Hansen: ‘Oh…well I thought they really were witches…’

Through the convoluted haze of centuries of historical discussion, it is evident that ‘history’ is a malleable concept. After all, one of the largest issues surrounding historical debates is the different portrayals of history through time. How is it that one event can cause such conflict and diverse argument? What has allowed historians to continually re-write history? Through examining different interpretations on the controversial topic of the causes of the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, I hope to shed some light on why establishing causation is so difficult, and how and why historians can write about the same event in radically different ways.

In the winter of 1691/92, two young Puritan girls began suffering from disorderly speech, odd postures, and convulsive fits in the village of Salem, Massachusetts, New England. In the space of less than two years, nineteen had been hanged, an elderly man crushed to death, five dead in prison and over one-hundred and fifty persons left incarcerated . However, Witch-hunts were by no means an unfamiliar concept. Tens of thousands of people in Europe and European colonies has died at the stake or gallows between 1400 and 1650. What makes the Salem trials one of the most universally famous and fascinating is that it happened when and where it did. Yet its root causes continue to baffle historians.

Contemporary historians such as Cotton Mather viewed the events through the narrow scope of Puritan theology, where what couldn’t be rationally explained was attributed to “horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers” and “demons of the invisible world” . In the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Thomas Hutchinson stated “A little attention must force conviction that the whole was a scene of fraud and imposture.” Both views are one-dimensional and easily placed within a specific social and historical-school-of-thought context. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that what they wrote left a basis for future historians to debate, investigate and improve on.

It is through twentieth century historians, however, that we see the spectrum of causation theories increasing. Burgeoning technologies, significant increases in medical knowledge, and the expansion of ‘new-history’ and inter-disciplinary studies, have all allowed for causative historical debates to be kept alive. This is not to say that it has made determining the cause of the Salem witch trials any easier. Winfield S. Nevins perhaps best reveals the implicit uncertainties of modern historians:

‘I must confess to a measure of doubt as to the moving causes of this terrible tragedy. It seems impossible to believe the tithe of the statements which were made at the trials. And yet it is equally difficult to say that nine out of every ten men, women and children who testified upon their oaths, intentionally and wilfully falsified.’

Hundreds of affidavits and court documents remain today, but the impossibility of demonic intervention in a modern context means historians are required to read beyond the written evidence, and look at different types of sources in order to speculate. One such example of this is Linnda Carporeal’s 1976 paper ‘Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?’, in which she explores the ‘potential existence of physical pathology’ and makes an argument in favour of convulsive ergotism induced via the ingestion of infected rye.