33 pages • 1 hour read
Paul S. BoyerSalem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “What Happened in 1692”
During the fall of 1691, a group of teenage girls in Salem Village began the harmless practice of foretelling their futures. Divination of this sort was tolerated, though not condoned by the Puritan church. Before the end of 1692, the innocent diversion morphed into a persecution that resulted in the execution of 20 people and the arrest of 200 others on charges of witchcraft.
Because of the limited judicial apparatus available at the time, the witch trials were conducted primarily by local religious ministers, who had difficulty defining the nature of the crime. “For although witchcraft was indisputably a crime according to the word of God, the common law of England, and the statutes of Massachusetts,” the authors write, “it was, for those concerned with the law, the most maddening and frustrating crime imaginable” (11).
Though the crime was supposedly committed by unseen demonic forces, the court endeavored to rely on concrete proof to substantiate the charge. This consisted of confessions from accused witches, the testimony of eyewitnesses, a witch’s demonstrated inability to utter prayers, physical devil’s marks on the accused, episodes of anger followed by mischief, unexplained deaths of an accused’s victims, and spectral evidence given by a witness.
Because of the difficulty of prosecution, other New England cases of witchcraft were never blown out of proportion to the same extent as what happened in Salem Village. “For historians, the continuing fascination and challenge of the Salem witchcraft outbreak has lain in the fact that a simple review of the events of 1692 raises so many more questions than it answers,” the authors write (20). They speculate that something was quite different about the local atmosphere. The rest of Salem Possessed is an attempt to uncover the unique conditions that led to the witch craze in that place and time.
Chapter 1 Summary: “1692: Some New Perspectives”
Salem has become part of the popular imagination in the same way as Custer’s Last Stand or the pilgrim’s landing at Plymouth Rock. Historians treat the Salem phenomenon as if its outcome was somehow inevitable, yet the authors posit that events might have gone an entirely different way. They suggest that the townsfolk viewed the hysterical girls as the victims of dark forces. The adults in the village were intent on interpreting the outbreak of hysteria as demonic, yet they dismissed the ecstatic religious visions the girls were having at the same time. By contrast, the ministers of Boston took a completely different view when Mercy Short, a servant girl, exhibited many of the same symptoms as the hysterical girls of Salem.
In both Salem and Boston, it was primarily young people who experienced visions, but the adult moral authorities interpreted the phenomena from opposite ends of the spectrum. Salem Village saw these visitations as demonic; Boston saw them as a form of spiritual crisis that would lead to transcendence. By 1734, when religious anxiety arose in Northampton, Massachusetts, it led to a full-blown manifestation of religious revival rather than accusations of witchcraft.
Now narrowing their focus to the specifics of the witchcraft charges in Salem, the authors discuss the pattern these charges took. Initially, the accusations were slow to emerge. The hysterical girls only began to name others after pressured examination by local clergymen. The numbers of the accused swelled as those suspected began to name others in the community. The first witches to be named were social outliers: a black slave, a beggar, and an invalid. Only later did the accusers move up the social ladder to point the finger at landed gentry and eventually the wife of the governor. The most significant pattern of the accusations relates to geography. The accused witches and their defenders lived on the east side of Salem Village while their detractors all lived to the west.
Chapter 2 Summary: “In Quest of Community, 1639 - 1687”
The dividing line between accusers and accused can be traced to the peculiar political climate that prevailed in Salem. The Village was originally an unincorporated part of the larger community known as Salem Town and was settled by farmers. This group felt disenfranchised from the very start since they were obligated to pay taxes and support the activities of the Town despite their geographical remoteness from it. “For years after 1672, then,” the authors write, “Salem Village was a distinct community without its own town government, and a distinct parish without its own church. This subordinate status was reflected in a variety of subtle ways” (43).
Two acrimonious disputes arose regarding the appointment of a minister for Salem Village independent of the ordained minister in the Town. The Town viewed these disputes as evidence that the Village was too disorganized to regulate its own affairs and maintain order. Because the Town didn’t want to be bothered with Village matters, it allowed a great degree of control to devolve to the local congregation rather than to the higher status members of the church. Within a very few years, the inhabitants of Salem Village considered it their right to manage their own community, but factionalism within the area prevented them from doing so successfully.
The political gray area represented by Salem Village became crucial to the course taken by the witch trials. Once hysteria broke out, there was no effective mechanism for coping with it, and the village institutions “were all practically useless as instruments for the resolution of differences” (50).
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
In 1692, one group of villagers accuses others of witchcraft resulting in 20 executions and hundreds of arrests. These are the bare facts of the case, but the authors wish to examine the context in which the crisis arose. They focus on the anomaly that Salem represents since many other regions recorded accusations of witchcraft, but none rose to the level of hysteria exhibited by the people of Salem.
By taking a contextual approach, the authors are trying to avoid earlier assumptions that the phenomenon of the witch trials was a foregone conclusion that could easily be explained by the superstition and religious fervor of the times. In contrast, Salem Possessed posits a theory that nothing that happened in Salem was inevitable. The inhabitants might have made entirely different choices if conditions within the Village had been different.
Rather than dismissing the witch craze as imagination run wild, the authors focus heavily on the role that geography played in creating the crisis. Very few scholars had studied the demographic evidence to look for patterns among the accusers and accused. The data immediately reveals that the accusers were from the west side of the village while the accused resided on the east side. Even though the authors don’t delve into the meaning of this divergence at this point in the book, the fact that it exists at all suggests an underlying animosity between west and east. This single fact contradicts the general assumption that the witch craze could have happened anywhere in colonial America. In this section, the authors have begun to build a case that it could only have happened in Salem Village.
