Crazy Crazy Essay

This is what I have so far.... I think it's about 2300 words. No footnotes because Blogger is crazy!

Analyse different opinions on the cause/s of the Salem witch trials. How and why has this event been interpreted differently? What do these differences reveal about the nature of history and causation?

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.’
Carporael: ‘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 development 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 requires historians to read beyond the written evidence. The social and historical context must be taken into account in order to speculate on causation. The myriad of modern interpretations that exist are predominantly born from focusing on different aspects of context alone as a means of explaining the written record; this is why I believe that establishing an extensive knowledge of the social circumstances of an epoch is an essential aspect of any valid historians work. Understanding Salem in 1692 is no exception. As a New England colony comprised of Puritan settlers, it is important to understand their religious worldview. However, aspects of colonial Massachusetts that have been deemed important by modern historians include not only religion, but social and political factionalism between Salem Village and Salem Town, effects of Indian Wars, smallpox epidemics, ergotism, psychological frameworks and the ethnicity of slave Tituba. Not only do these specific enquiries aid in attempting to explain the written testimony, they attempt to answer the causative question of ‘why Salem?’.

One of the most influential interpretations of this type is found in the collaborative work of American historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. Their paper Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft is the second, and most extensive, of the three papers they co-wrote . They propose that the trials were the outcome, at a fundamental level, of ongoing conflict between Salem Town and Salem Village in a ‘convergence of a specific and unlikely combination of historical circumstances at this particular time and place.’ Explained simply, the trials were the ‘ephemera’ of a bitter and drawn-out factionalist dispute between the religious, but relatively politically powerless, Puritans of Salem Village, and the entrepreneurial merchant capitalists of Salem Town. It was as much a political conflict as it was a religious one, a fight between the old and the new, and it was one that had been brewing for years aided by the physical setting and vacillating Boston authorities.

Boyer and Nissenbaum explained how their theory was born in the preface to Salem Possessed. During the autumn of 1969 the two were organising a new course to be taught at the University of Massachusetts, with Salem witchcraft at its core; “New Approaches to the Study of History”. During this time they discovered that a large proportion of primary evidence pre-dating the events of 1692 had never been studied by historians . Amongst these were lists of community votes, tax assessments, petitions ‘which provided almost a roll-call breakdown of divisions within the community’ , a previously ignored volume of Reverend Samuel Parris’ sermons which provided a commentary of the towns problems, and a supplementary body of family materials (wills, deeds, estates, law suits). Accumulated, they provide overwhelming evidence for a pre-existing social issue that had been acknowledged, but not sufficiently investigated.
All of this adds a new dynamic to the process of re-writing history. What had been previously been deemed as unimportant by historians was suddenly of immense value to those working post-Annales. Why the sudden interest in these demographic and documentary sources? The historians themselves provide the answer.

‘It is only recently that historians (ourselves among them) have begun more fully to realize how much information the study of “ordinary” people living in “ordinary” communities can bring to the most fundamental historical questions’

Through their through and methodological investigation of these new sources, Boyer and Nissenbaum have been able to make a valid, logical hypothesis that is backed by the historical record. Cleary influenced by Annales historiography and the detailed study of local history, the two are able to place the entire Salem event within its own historical and social context, as opposed to in a modern one. The hunts occurred in Salem as a result of Puritanist expression, and were elevated by the specific context of the area.

Further expanding on the work of Boyer and Nissenbaum is James Kences, who attempts to explain the psychological factors present in the community, and the affect this had on the ‘afflicted’ girls. After summing up his theory he writes “The 1692 witch hunt was very much a product of King William’s War, which seems not only have exacerbated village factionalism, but to have promoted the further alienation of Salem Village from Salem Town” . His work makes explicit the importance of using other historians work when it comes to creating your own. Without his synthesis with Boyer and Nissenbaum’s work, his hypothesis may have lacked sufficient basis and been discredited. Instead it is a valid and thoroughly fascinating response to the ever changing historical climate and approach to sources.

Kences’ work has the impressive title of ‘Some Unexplored Relationships of Essex County Witchcraft to the Indian Wars of 1675 and 1687’ , and the basis for his argument is derived from the fact that to the New Englanders, Indians were synonymous with witchcraft and at the time the lives of the people of colonial Massachusetts were dominated by their relationships with them. Drawing from historical documentation not only from Salem, but from the surrounding area, Kences is able to retrace the origins of the afflicted girls and makes a startling observation; nearly all of them had either been displaced by Indian attack or had family members killed in them. He then notes that “Essex County had already displayed signs of what social psychologists refer to as “invasion neurosis”, the extreme tension of anticipating an attack which does not materialise.”

Kences hypothesis is interesting because it combines the context of the time with modern medical explanations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and hysteria, and reflects the way different ways history can be approached over time. Increasing knowledge about the psyche and the effect of trauma on the individual and the community has allowed Kences to approach the issue of causation in a radically new way. The only problem with psychological explanations is that it is impossible to ever prove them. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any credibility to the claims, but it does further serve to cloud the issue of causation.

Some historians have also chosen to explore completely new avenues of historical methodology, combining the disciplines of historical research with modern knowledge of disease and physiology. One such example of this is Linnda Carporael’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. Caporael originally studied psychology, as well as human ethology at University,

Pavlac explains the need for “scientific” theories aptly; ‘This interpretation satisfies an understandable desire for removing human responsibility for the hunts.’ It’s almost a new-age way of blaming the devil. Whilst I don’t believe that the Salem panic can be attributed to ergotism, I do think Caporael effectively demonstrates how the use of innovative types of evidence and sources expands our ability to interpret the past. There is validity in exploring medical avenues, even if the victims have been dead for over 300 years. If anything, new interpretations keep historical debates at the forefront of educated minds; it keeps history alive.

This is exemplified by the work of Nicholas Spanos, who disputes the ergotism argument and provides his own hypothesis. (My Spanos debate will go here)
We will probably never know what caused the Salem Witch Hunts of 1692. But what’s important is that we never stop trying too. Our understanding of the past changes over time and it is thus essential that historians continue to re-analyse past events. (I’m not really sure how to sum everything up yet…)