In the bitter winter of 1692, Salem, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was gripped by an accusation of witchcraft that began with the strange fits of two young girls: Betty Parris, the local minister's daughter, and her cousin Abigail Williams. Within months the panic had metastasized into a colony-wide crisis — neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, and even respected church members and a former Salem minister, George Burroughs, stood accused. By the time the hysteria subsided, nineteen men and women had been hanged and one man, Giles Corey, pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff draws on trial records, sermons, and letters to reconstruct the Puritan world that produced the Salem witch trials — a society of rigid faith, political anxiety, and neighborly grudges in which spectral evidence could send a woman to the gallows. She examines the roles played by the afflicted girls, by ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather, and by the judges and magistrates who presided over the proceedings, asking how a community of otherwise rational people came to believe the devil walked among them.
A meticulously researched work of narrative history, The Witches restores Salem's convulsive year to its full, unsettling complexity.