Books about witch trials

The book bristles with magic — there are talking heads, raining teeth and deals with the devil, but there is also a fierce analysis of power and its abuses. A daughter of the sun, she is banished to Aiaia where, part-god, part-herbalist, she teaches herself magic. Acrasia is wily; she stupefies men with sex and turns them into pigs, but her bower is all music, all delight. Nevertheless, Acrasia gets tied up and Sir Guyon trashes her bower.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas Thomas shows how belief in magic and witchcraft were woven into the way people made sense of the world in the 16th and 17th centuries.

And well she might. Gaskell shows us a community in terrified opposition to its native forests and people. I love the way she refuses to condescend or simply condemn — she puts the reader in the middle of the panic, feeling it spread. On her breast she wears the shameful scarlet letter, but Hester has sewn it herself, beautifully, ingeniously and as it weaves itself into her life and through the novel, it accrues new meanings and readings.

To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop. Top 10 books about witch-hunts. The public hanging of witches in Scotland. Coloured engraving, Top 10 books about wild women. Each chapter covers each month during the trials, starting in January of when the Salem Village girls first showed signs of being afflicted.

Since the events and chronology of the trials can get confusing and complicated at times, this book is great at sorting out exactly what happened and when. In doing so, it provides an overview of the colony in the 17th century and explains how the setting for the witch hysteria in developed slowly over time.

Each chapter is about a different aspect of the witch trials, such as the history of Salem and the influence it had on the mass hysteria in , the town politics of Salem Village, and the different groups of people involved in the trials such as the judges, the accused and the accusers. The last few chapters are devoted to the aftermath of the trials, which is a topic many books about the witch trials often overlook. Baker is a professor at Salem State University and is also a member of the Gallows Hill Project that confirmed the witch trials execution site in and was featured in many of the articles and television interviews about the discovery.

Published in by Harvard University Press, this book explores the social setting and history of Salem prior to the witch trials to provide a better understanding of how and why they happened. The book explores issues that occurred in Salem just prior to the trials such as factionalism, land disputes, family rivalries and church disputes. In the intro, Boyer and Nissenbaum state that up until the time this book was published almost no other historians had explored these issues before and explained the only one that had come close was Charles W.

Upham in his book Salem Witchcraft. When they realized this, it encouraged them to write this book to give readers a more thorough understanding of the trials. Boyer, who passed away in , was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin who earned his Phd from Harvard. Nissenbaum is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He received a doctorate of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published in , instead of looking at the big picture or listing the chronology of the events, this book explores the personal lives of the people involved in the trials to form a sort of psychological profile of the colony at the time. The chapters are divided by the roles each group of people played in the trials, such as the accusers, the victims, the clergy, the judges and the elite the wealthy outsiders and government officials.

The book really helps the reader understand what life was like for these individuals at the time and puts their actions into perspective.

It brings a much needed humanizing aspect to this complex topic. Despite the fact that Foulds is not a historian and mostly writes on travel-related topics, she does a great job of delving deep into the lives of the people involved in the trials and exploring their personal stories.

Published in , this book explores the psychology and social issues behind the Salem Witch Trials. The book theorizes that the trials were caused mostly by issues such as fear, religion and politics. The book explains that the trials were the result of a repressed society acting out its greatest fears and lashing out against those they deemed responsible for their suffering. A Delusion of Satan also details the similarities between the Salem Witch Trials and modern day witch hunts such as the communist scare in the s and the Islamophobia brought about after September 11, Published in , this book suggests that the community of Salem was living in a constant state of fear at the time and this fear is what set the stage for the mass hysteria and the witch trials.

Norton argues that the people of Salem felt they were under attack and believed the Devil was responsible for their suffering. Salem residents at the time were suffering from numerous problems, from disease outbreaks to war to crop failures, and they believed at the time that witches and the devil were often behind such unfortunate events.

The book is laid out chronologically to help readers understand these events as they happened. Norton is a historian and a professor of American History at Cornell University. Published in , The Devil in Massachusetts takes the dialogue of the Salem Witch Trials court records and uses it to tell the story of the trials in a dramatic narrative. Many authors of newer books on the trials have cited The Devil in Massachusetts as one of the first well-researched and investigative books on the Salem Witch Trials.

Starkey, who died in , was a former newspaper editor who later became an author. The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The Crucible is a play that first premiered on Broadway in Although the play is set in Salem in and depicts the events of the Salem Witch Trials , it is actually an allegory for the Red Scare that took place in the United States in the s.

In the Crucible, Miller was comparing the witch hunt in Salem to the witch hunt for Communists in the s. The Crucible is both a blessing and a curse for anyone interested in learning more about the Salem Witch Trials.

On the plus side, it was responsible for kick starting a renewed interest in the witch trials and it fueled the start of the tourism industry in Salem. Yet one major drawback is, because it is based on the trials many readers mistaken believe that the play is historically accurate and think many of the things that happened in the play actually happened in real life.

As a result, a lot of myths and misunderstandings have stemmed from this play as well as the movie adaptation released in Miller took a lot of liberties with the story, which he had the right to do as a playwright, and injected his own theories, ideas and events. Miller was inspired to write The Crucible after reading Charles W. The book was one of the first contemporary books published on the topic and is cited as an important historical book on the topic.

Originally published in French in and later translated to English, this novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Tituba, a slave of Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the first women accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. This novel is interesting because Tituba is an often overlooked individual in the trials and this novel tries to remedy that by shining a light on her life.

In doing so, the novel explores the role of gender and race in the witch trials and challenges traditionally white, male dominated historical narratives. Conde, a French author and former professor at Columbia University, has written numerous historical fiction novels, including the book Segu. Her novels typically explores social issues such as race and gender. Published in , this novel is a fictionalized account of the afflicted girls of Salem Village.